📄 Framing Space. Determining the Meaning of Space-Related Biblical Hebrew Lexemes

Summary

The paper links two strands of biblical scholarship that rarely meet: critical spatial theory (Lefebvre's perceived, conceived and lived space, which Soja recast as Firstspace, Secondspace and Thirdspace) and lexical semantics. Ziegert brings in Fillmore's frame semantics, which reads word meaning as a whole prototypical scene with slots (Minsky's term) and constraints between them. He uses the verbs of the Hebrew roots prd and bdl, both usually glossed "separate," as a test case. His method has several steps:

• collect every attestation of a verb;
• prefer narrative passages that describe concrete scenes;
• tag the participants with case-grammar roles;
• gather recurring elements into slots;
• write constraints and then test the frames on disputed passages.

The analysis yields two frames for prd and three for bdl, and each frame maps onto exactly one kind of space. prd stays physical (Firstspace), while bdl builds conceptual and lived spaces. This undercuts the dictionary view that the two roots are synonyms. It also shows that spatial categories are visible at the level of single words.

Key points

• The test lexemes are verbs of the roots prd and bdl. Two frames are reconstructed for prd and three for bdl, and every frame is assigned to a single spatial domain.
• Both prd frames belong to Firstspace. bdl frames #1 and #2 belong to Secondspace, and bdl frame #3 belongs to Thirdspace.
• In Lev 20:24–26, bdl frame #1 has the slots Agentive, Experiencer, Totality and Purpose.
  • On this reading, Israel's separation is conceptual, not physical.
  • Its goal is belonging to YHWH rather than separation for its own sake.
• The role labels come from Fillmore's case grammar: Agentive, Instrumental, Dative/Experiencer, Factitive, Locative and Objective. Extra labels are added when two agents act reciprocally.
• The roots are spread unevenly across books:
  • Proverbs mostly uses prd (Firstspace).
  • The Holiness and priestly texts focus on Secondspace.
  • Ezra–Nehemiah, with its concern for identity, brings in Thirdspace.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Frames are induced bottom-up: tag the participants in every attestation with coarse roles, then promote only the elements that recur into slots and constraints. This gives a transparent, repeatable way to derive a frame inventory from a corpus.
• I2. The study deliberately avoids translation glosses and defines meaning through a prototypical scene, because a gloss like "separate" can hide two quite different senses.
• I3. Each sense frame is labelled with one orthogonal tag: physical, conceptual or socially lived space. This sanity-checks the sense split, since a frame that cannot be placed signals unclear analysis.
• I4. The frame includes a Purpose slot, which changes how the verb is read: the separation exists for the sake of belonging, not apartness.
• I5. Curation is biased toward concrete narrative scenes with human participants, because those carry the most situational detail for reconstructing a frame.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (frames): Frame entries for rare verbs that VerbNet covers poorly could be induced this way, aggregating role labels over parsed occurrences and keeping slots that pass a frequency threshold.
• I2 (world): Lexicon entries could be keyed to scene descriptions (slots plus constraints) rather than synonym lists, so that near-synonyms do not merge into one world-state update.
• I3 (world): An ontology tag such as physical-relation versus classification-relation would let the world model tell a real spatial move from a mere categorisation ("set apart as unclean").
• I4 (frames): Purpose/goal slots that are left implicit could be kept as explicit open slots, so that QA can ask what an act of separating or choosing was for.
• I5 (learn): Silver frame data could be weighted toward narrative sentences with animate agents, with abstract or poetic uses held out as a harder evaluation set.