Fronting and exhaustive exclusion in Biblical Hebrew
What it is about
A four-page note on fronting: a finite verbal clause in which a non-verb constituent comes before the verb. In 1 Samuel (337 fronted clauses) about two thirds are explained by information structure: a topic chosen from a set and compared or contrasted with another (1 Sam 15:34), or a focus (the answer to a question, 1 Sam 26:6). Of the remaining third, most have a fronted subject and set up common ground at the start of an episode, give background, report an out-of-the-blue event, or mark simultaneity. The author then isolates a small family: an indefinite subject before a negated verb ("a razor shall not go up on his head", 1 Sam 1:11), and proposes that this construction expresses exhaustive exclusion ("no X at all"), the mirror of כֹּל for exhaustive inclusion, since Hebrew has no word for "no one/nothing" as a quantifier.
Ideas
- I1. Label fronted clauses (X before a finite verb) with a function from a small closed set: contrastive topic, focus, episode opening, background, out-of-the-blue event, simultaneity, exhaustive exclusion. Measure the share of each over the Torah, against the paper's 65/35 split for 1 Samuel.
- I2. A rule for exhaustive exclusion: indefinite noun subject (no article, no suffix, not construct-bound to a definite) + לֹא + finite verb → read as "no X" in the English gloss and as negative universal in the world; check against JPS 1917 ("no razor", "none").
- I3. A rule for the fronted-subject episode opener: we-X-qatal after a wayyiqtol chain whose subject is a new or reactivated participant → background / scene setting, not mainline.
- I4. Pair focus fronting with a preceding question (מִי … ? — אֲנִי …) as a question–answer test for focus.
For Mova
I1 and I3 go into languages/hbo/08-syntax.md (word order, dislocation) and 09-discourse.md (mainline vs background), and into tools/macula/src/prag.rs as candidate rules, each measured with --with/--without against the JPS reading. I2 is a prag polarity rule and a gloss rule for the Torah dictionary's examples (10-lexicon.md, the entry for לֹא). I4 is a check for focus in prag, cheap because question detection is already there.
Institutions
South AfricaTopics Hebrew & Aramaic Semitic languages
Cite
Cite as Christo van der Merwe. 2018. Fronting and exhaustive exclusion in Biblical Hebrew. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics.
@inproceedings{merwe2018fronting,
title = {{Fronting and exhaustive exclusion in Biblical Hebrew}},
author = {Christo {van der Merwe}},
booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.5774/48-0-292},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5774/48-0-292}
}References
- Erteschik-Shir, N. 2007. Information structure: The syntax-discourse interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
- Krifka, M. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure 6: 13-55. find
- Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information structure and sentence from: Topic, focus and the mental representation of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
- Lunn, N. P. 2006. Word-order variation in Biblical poetry. Bletchley, Milton Keynes: Paternoster. find
- Moshavi, A. 2010. Word order in the Biblical Hebrew finite clause: A syntactic and pragmatic analysis of preposing. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. find
- See Moshavi (2010: 167-169). Also 1 Sam 13:19; 21:3; 25:28; 27:11 and 28:20. find
- Christo H. J. van der Merwe Song, J. J. 2012. Word order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
- Song, S. 2017. Modeling information structure in a cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: Language Science Press. find
- Van der Merwe, C. H. J. 2013. Fronting. In G. Khan (ed.) Encyclopedia of Hebrew language and linguistics. Leiden: Brill. pp. 931-935. find
- Van der Merwe, C. H. J., J. A. Naudé and J. H. Kroeze 2017. A Biblical Hebrew reference grammar. 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury. find
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