AdinaMoshavi 2010 WordOrderintheBiblicalHebrewFiniteClause
AdinaMoshavi 2010 WordOrderintheBiblicalHebrewFiniteClause
AdinaMoshavi 2010 WordOrderintheBiblicalHebrewFiniteClause
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Word Order in the
Biblical Hebrew Finite Clause
A DINA MOSHAVI
www.eisenbrauns.com
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1984.†Ê
List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii
Technical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. The pragmatics of preposing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2. The corpus for the study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3. Overview of the chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. Word-Order Markedness in Biblical Hebrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1. Basic word order: Typological and generative perspectives . . 7
2.2. Basic word order in Biblical Hebrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2.1. The statistical dominance of VSO in Biblical
Hebrew 11
2.2.2. Word order in the basic sentence 13
2.2.3. The generative perspective on basic word order in
Biblical Hebrew 16
2.2.4. Word order and discourse type 17
2.2.5. Word order in the nonverbal and the participial
clause 17
2.3. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3. Previous Studies of the Functions of Preposing in
Biblical Hebrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.1. The emphasis-centered model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.1.1. Contrast and contrastive structures 19
3.1.2. Circumstantiality, anteriority, and simultaneity 20
3.1.3. Narrative-unit demarcation 24
3.1.4. Attraction 25
3.1.5. Miscellaneous factors 26
3.1.6. Preposing in direct speech 26
3.1.7. Conclusion 26
3.2. The backgrounding and temporal-sequencing models . . . . . 27
vii
xi
General
BH Biblical Hebrew
NAB New American Bible
NJB New Jerusalem Bible
NJPSV New Jewish Publication Society Version
NP noun phrase
NRSV New Revised Standard Version
O object
RSV Revised Standard Version
S subject
V verb
VP verb phrase
Reference Works
AfroLing Afroasiatic Linguistics
BDB Brown, Francis; Driver, S. R.; and Briggs, Charles A. A Hebrew and
English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1907
BHS Elliger, K., and Rudolph, W., editors. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.
Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1984
BI Balšanut Ivrit
Bib Biblica
BibOr Bibliotheca Orientalis
BN Biblische Notizen
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
DiscProc Discourse Processes
FolOr Folia Orientalia
GKC Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, rev. A. E. Cowley. 2nd ed.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1910
HALOT Köhler, Ludwig and Baumgartner, Walter. The Hebrew and Aramaic
Lexicon of the Old Testament, rev. Walter Baumgartner et al. 1st English
ed. 5 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000
HAR Hebrew Annual Review
HS Hebrew Studies
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual
IOS Israel Oriental Studies
JANES Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society
xii
The translations of the biblical citations in this work are my own, in consul-
tation primarily with the NJPSV, RSV, and NRSV. An attempt is made to render the
syntactic structure of the Hebrew as literally as possible, for the purposes of
illustrating the syntactic analyses presented in the text. The results are at times
far from idiomatic.
Preposed clauses in the citations are generally marked by underlining when
the citation contains more than one clause. Citations consisting of a single
preposed clause are not underlined.
The symbol * is used to mark an ungrammatical sentence, and # marks a
sentence that is pragmatically unacceptable, being inappropriate in the given
context.
xiv
This book has its origins in my 2000 dissertation, The Pragmatics of Word
Order in Biblical Hebrew: A Statistical Analysis, completed at Yeshiva Uni-
versity under the direction of Richard C. Steiner. I submitted the dissertation
to Eisenbrauns that same year, intending to publish it with minor revisions.
Continuing to study pragmatic and syntactic issues related to word order over
the next six years, I worked on what turned out to be, essentially, an entirely
new book on Biblical Hebrew word order. The completed manuscript was sub-
mitted to Eisenbrauns in November 2006 and accepted for publication in May
2007.
My dissertation dealt with the pragmatics of inverted (XV) word order in
declarative nonsubordinate finite clauses in Genesis and showed by means of
multivariate statistical analysis that focus-background structure (including fo-
cusing and topicalization, as defined there) and nonsequentiality are associated
with word order inversion. In preparing the book, I broadened the scope of the
project by including all nonsubordinate finite clauses and analyzed a much
larger corpus, Genesis–2 Kings, with the help of electronic searches for vari-
ous syntactic constructions. The result of the syntactic analysis, presented in
chapter 5, is a taxonomy of marked and unmarked word-order constructions
in the finite clause. I also gave further attention to the fundamental question
whether VSO or SVO is the basic word order in Biblical Hebrew; the conclu-
sions are presented in chapter 2.
On reflection, it became clear that the pragmatic categories used in the dis-
sertation, based as they were to a large degree on discussions in the general
linguistic literature, artificially excluded many biblical clauses that intuitively
appear to belong to the same categories. A key insight was realizing that focus-
ing and topicalization are fundamentally different kinds of pragmatic functions,
not two variations of focus-background structure, as is often claimed (see §6.2
below). In this book, focusing and topicalization have been reconceptualized,
using insights from psycholinguistic research on text comprehension and from
linguistic research on discourse connectives. The newly defined concepts, I
believe, are more intuitively satisfying and represent a significant advance in
the understanding of marked word-order function in Biblical Hebrew and, po-
tentially, in other languages as well.
xv
particularly grateful to the editors of this series, the late Michael P. O’Connor
and Cynthia L. Miller, for their detailed and extensive comments on the dis-
sertation. I would like to thank Amy Becker at Eisenbrauns for her careful
copyediting and proofreading of the final manuscript.
I had the opportunity to present some of my work to the international re-
search group on the subject of Biblical Hebrew in its northwest Semitic setting
at the Institute for Advanced Study at Hebrew University in 2001–2. I am
grateful to many members of the research group, including Steven E. Fassberg,
W. Randall Garr, Edward L. Greenstein, Jo Ann Hackett, John Huehnergard,
Avi Hurvitz, Jan Joosten, and Elisha Qimron, for their valuable comments. In
addition, I thank Elitzur Bar-Asher, Yochanan Breuer, Randall Buth, Vincent
DeCaen, Robert D. Holmstedt, Uri Mor, and Yael Ziv for their very helpful
comments on various drafts of my work. I also thank Moshe Bar-Asher and my
colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar Ilan University for
their encouragement and support.
Financial assistance came from several sources. I would like to thank the
Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University for its generous assis-
tance. I am grateful for a doctoral scholarship from the Memorial Foundation
for Jewish Culture and for a doctoral dissertation fellowship from the National
Foundation for Jewish Culture. I would also like to thank the staff at the Ye-
shiva University libraries for their research assistance.
This book is dedicated to my beloved parents, Richard and Orah Mosak, to
whom I owe everything. They instilled in me a love of learning and encour-
aged me to follow my ambitions. The ideals they imbued in me have guided me
in every area of my life. I also dedicate this work to my husband and soul-mate,
Shimon, who has provided unflagging support for all my endeavors. Without
his help, it would have been unfeasible to immerse myself in academic pursuits
while simultaneously raising five young children. I am also grateful to Shimon
for proofreading and commenting on large portions of the manuscript.
My paternal grandparents, Jacob and Pearl Mosak, have been a source of
inspiration for me in so many ways. I am grateful to them for their love and
support. My late maternal grandparents, Abraham and Shalva Eliezri, were
also a source of much love and encouragement. Their passion for their ideals
made an indelible impression on me and helped to shape the course of my life.
I am grateful to my father- and mother-in-law, Baruch and Ettie Moshavi, for
their love and encouragement. Finally, I thank my children, Elisheva, Chaviva,
Tziona, Gavriel, and Zecharya, for tolerating the many hours I spent complet-
ing this work and, more importantly, for bringing me so much happiness.
Introduction
1. The term typology has several uses in linguistics; the intended meaning here is the
classification of structural language types and the study of language universals, that is, sys-
tematically occurring language patterns (Croft 2003: 1). Greenberg’s (1966a, 1966b) semi-
nal works form the foundation of this field. For a discussion of research on word order uni-
versals and their application to the Semitic language group, see O’Connor (1980: 115–18).
2. On the concept of markedness, see chap. 2, pp. 7ff.
3. For a discussion of pragmatics and its relation to semantics, see Levinson (1983:
1–35).
4. See chap. 4, pp. 48ff., for definitions of these and other syntactic terms relating to the
BH clause.
5. On this point, however, see §9.3 n. 19 (p. 152 below). For a comprehensive study of
the syntactic characteristics of biblical poetry, see Sappan (1981). Syntactic studies that are
specifically limited to prose texts include Hoftijzer (1981, 1985), de Regt (1988), and Miller
(2003).
6. On word-order patterns in poetry, see O’Connor (1980: 297–355), Floor (2005),
Rosenbaum (1997), and Lunn (2006).
7. Berlin (1985: 4–16) writes that, though the essential feature of poetry is parallelism,
parallelism is also found in prose. The difference is that, in poetry, parallelism is the con-
structive principle of the text, while in prose it is not used systematically. A similar idea is
expressed in Jakobsen (1967). Greenstein (2000) notes that parallelism is often found in di-
rect speech in prose passages in the Bible and suggests that this preserves an ancient literary
convention. Kugel (1981) takes the radical view that the frequent presence of parallelism in
prose texts makes the prose/poetry dichotomy inaccurate and misleading as applied to Bibli-
cal Hebrew. For further discussion of the use of poetic devices in prose, see §8.5.
8. On this classification of the stages of BH, see, e.g., Hurvitz (1972, 1982); Kutscher
(1982: 12); Joüon-Muraoka (§3b); Rendsburg (1991); Steiner (1997: 146).
9. On late BH syntax, see, e.g., Kropat (1909); Hurvitz (1972, 1982); Polzin (1976);
Rooker (1990a, 1990b).
10. This corpus is the basis of linguistic studies such as van der Merwe (1990) and Miller
(2003). It might argue against the linguistic unity of this corpus that the traditional dating
of the Priestly source (P) in source criticism is in the Postexilic Period. Linguistic evidence
shows, however, that this dating of P is mistaken. Hurvitz (1982) finds that the linguistic fea-
tures of the texts assigned to P are compatible with those of classical prose texts, and exclu-
sively late features do not occur at all in P. According to Hurvitz, P predates Ezekiel, which
he views as the transition between classical and late BH. See also Rendsburg (1980). Literary
evidence for the preexilic dating of P is presented in Zevit (1982) and Friedman (1997).
11. Despite an overall picture of uniformity, some degree of variation is present in the
corpus. Variation is not always attributable to diachronic factors and sometimes can be given
a sociological interpretation, as Labov (1972) and others have shown. In addition, as noted
by Miller (2003: 27), a certain degree of variation is present even in a homogeneous speech
community.
12. The searches were carried out using the Bibloi 8.0 software package, published by
Silver Mountain Software.
performed (see §5.6). The selection of Genesis for the statistical analysis was
motivated by the fact that this book is a long classical work consisting almost
entirely of prose. Because the overwhelming majority of finite clauses in BH
prose are unmarked, a long text must be analyzed to yield a sufficient number
of marked clauses. The pragmatic analysis of the preposing construction, pre-
sented in chaps. 7–9, is based on a contextual examination of all of the finite
nonsubordinate preposed clauses in the prose portions of Genesis.
The assumption is made here that the present form of Genesis constitutes
a coherent text, regardless of its prehistory. Although Genesis is considered
by source critics to have been composed from more than one source, it is
widely recognized that the book, as it stands, is a unified literary work. Driver
(1913: 8) writes of a “unity of plan” in Genesis that “has long been recognized
by critics.” Skinner (1930: ii, lxv) considers Genesis to be a “complete and
well rounded whole,” despite its composite origin as he sees it. In his view,
the final redactor of Genesis combined several sources in a purposeful design,
giving the work a unity that is “the plan of one particular writer.”13
The text of Genesis is written in two different discourse registers: narrative
and direct-speech quotations.14 Direct-speech quotations in the Bible appear
to be written not in the spoken register actually used in the biblical period but
rather in a literary dialect (Rendsburg 1990: 19). We do not have a record of the
spoken language itself, but it most likely resembled Mishnaic Hebrew, a liter-
ary dialect believed to be closely related to the earlier spoken one.15 Although
direct speech in BH does not represent the spoken register, it is nonetheless
distinct from the narrative register. Both Macdonald (1975) and Mali (1983)
note the greater degree of word order variation in direct speech as compared
to narrative, and Macdonald (1975) notes additional syntactic differences of a
systematic nature.
Polak (1999, 2001, 2003) identifies a variety of styles of quoted speech in
BH, including a conversational style, a formal style, and styles that are com-
binations of the first two. The conversational style resembles spoken language
in having a high number of clauses with at most one verbal complement, a low
number of subordinate clauses, and a low number of long noun phrases. The
formal style contrasts in each of these features, having more than one verbal
13. Other scholars who find unified literary structures in Genesis include Childs (1979:
145–57), Rendsburg (1986), Sarna (1989: xvi), Fokkelman (1991), and Alter (1996: xlii).
14. On the definition of direct speech and its distinction from indirect speech (catego-
rized as narrative), see Miller (2003). The issue is addressed in the present work in §4.4.3.
Heller (2004: 25) also recognizes narrative and direct speech as two primary types in BH
prose but does not provide syntactic or other criteria for distinguishing the two. Heller dis-
tinguishes five types of direct speech, based in large part on Longacre’s (e.g., 1982, 2003)
discourse-type typology; these are narrative, predictive, expository, hortatory, and interroga-
tive discourse.
15. See, e.g., Steiner (1992: 21); Sáenz-Badillos (1993: 112–13).
complement, many subordinate clauses, and many long noun phrases. Polak
notes (2001: 63; 2003) that some BH narrative is written in a conversational
style, which he argues indicates origin from an oral narrative.16
In this study, I distinguish only two registers, narrative and direct-speech
quotations. Although Polak is undoubtedly right that we should recognize a
variety of direct speech (as well as narrative) registers, the Genesis corpus is
too small for a statistical comparison of all of the varieties. I will show that
even with this oversimplified taxonomy it is possible to identify differences in
the frequency and function of preposing in the two registers.
The text utilized in the present work is the Masoretic Text (MT), as exem-
plified by BHS. It is common practice in statistical studies of BH to base the
analysis on an attested text, normally the MT, rather than a reconstructed one.17
Regardless of the merits of textual criticism in any particular instance, it can be
argued that including emendations in the data introduces undesirable elements
of subjectivity and uncertainty to the statistical analysis. Although the notion
of the MT is admittedly an oversimplification, differences between Masoretic
manuscripts mostly concern vocalization, accentuation, or orthography, and as
such are not relevant to syntax or pragmatics.18 The same is true of the Qere
and Ketib alternations in the Masoretic text of Genesis, with one exception.19
16. See also Polak (1999); he argues there that, in comparison to late BH, which is pri-
marily in a written style, classical BH narrative exhibits more of the informal traits charac-
teristic of spoken language.
17. Hurvitz’s (1982: 19) comments on this procedure are instructive:
This procedure is not followed out of an axiomatic belief in the supremacy of MT, nor
does it imply that it has reached us in exactly the same form in which it left the hands
of the ancient writers. . . . However, at the same time it seems to us that a linguistic
study whose central purpose is to seek facts and avoid conjectures, should base itself
on actual texts—difficult though they might be—rather than depend on reconstructed
texts. These latter are indeed free of difficulties and easy to work with; but we can
never be absolutely certain that they ever existed in reality.
See also Rendsburg (1990: 31–32); Miller (2003: 18).
18. More substantive differences can be found in some medieval manuscripts; e.g., the
word ‘ אחרafter’ in Gen 22:13 has the variant ‘ אחדone’ in several manuscripts, a variant also
reflected in the versions. The significance of medieval variants is a matter of debate. Many
argue that these variants mostly originate in the medieval period and only coincidentally
reflect ancient variants; see discussion in Tov (1992: 37–39) and Revell (1992: 598).
19. The exception is Gen 30:10 Ketib בגדQere בא גד. The Ketib is probably a preposi-
tional phrase meaning ‘with luck’; the Qere is a complete clause meaning ‘luck has come’.
Word-Order Markedness
in Biblical Hebrew
usually one order occurs in a wide variety of discourse contexts, whereas the
others have more restricted uses. The word order with a broader contextual dis-
tribution is the unmarked or basic order. Dryer (1995: 112) defines the concept
of pragmatic markedness as follows: “a construction is pragmatically marked
relative to another if the range of contexts in which it is appropriate is a proper
subset of the set of contexts in which the unmarked construction is used.” 5 Be-
cause the unmarked order is pragmatically acceptable in all contexts, the use
of the marked word order is always optional.
Basic word order is sometimes used to mean the statistically dominant order,
the one that is most frequent in spoken or written texts. 6 There is a widespread
assumption that the pragmatically neutral word order is also the most frequent.
According to Greenberg (1966b: 67), textual frequency is the only criterion by
which basic word order can be established. “Statistically dominant” is clearly
a less meaningful definition of basic word order than “pragmatically neutral,”
because frequency is a feature of language use rather than language structure.
In practice, however, researchers usually rely on textual frequency in establish-
ing basic word order, because proving that a particular order is pragmatically
neutral is an extremely involved procedure, requiring the identification and
classification of all discourse contexts in which each word order occurs.
Dryer (1995) notes several potential difficulties with relying on textual
frequency to determine basic word order. Word order frequency may vary in
different text types, raising the question of which text types most accurately
represent the frequencies of the various constructions. Longacre (1995: 333)
states that narrative texts are the most reliable, while Downing (1995: 20)
states that conversational texts are to be preferred. Others claim that conversa-
tion and narrative are both suitable as source data as long as the discourse is
oral, rather than written (Croft 2003: 111–12). The best approach would appear
to be to include a variety of text types in the analysis. A more serious problem
is that it is theoretically possible that a word order might be pragmatically
neutral yet not the most frequently occurring one; however, this appears to be
an atypical situation (Dryer 1995). Dryer concludes that “frequency may be a
useful diagnostic for pragmatic markedness, even if ultimately it is not a defin-
ing characteristic (1995: 116).
It is claimed that there are “free word-order” languages that do not have
a basic word order (Thompson 1978; Brody 1984; Comrie 1989: 88; Mithun
1992). In these languages, there is no one order that is statistically dominant
and pragmatically neutral as compared to other orders. In languages of this
sort, the word order in every sentence appears to be pragmatically motivated
(Thompson 1978, Mithun 1992).
A different approach to basic order defines the concept according to the
basic-sentence criterion. Siewierska (1988: 8) writes that “the term ‘basic or-
der’ is typically identified with the order that occurs in stylistically neutral,
independent, indicative clauses with full noun phrase (NP) participants, where
the subject is definite, agentive and human, the object is a definite seman-
tic patient, and the verb represents an action, not a state or event.” 7 Because
sentences satisfying all these requirements are uncommon, the basic-sentence
criterion results in the vast majority of naturally occurring sentences being
removed from consideration in determining unmarked word order. It is very
possible, therefore, that the basic-sentence criterion and the statistical criterion
will yield different unmarked word orders for a particular language.
An important point to be noted is the dependence of the basic-sentence
criterion on the criterion of pragmatic neutrality. Basic sentences may exhibit
more than one word order. To deal with this problem, Siewierska’s criterion
specifies that the unmarked order is the one found in “stylistically neutral” sen-
tences. In effect, then, the basic sentence criterion is essentially the pragmatic
criterion applied to a small subset of sentence types.
The typological conception of basic word order, whether based on prag-
matic neutrality, statistical dominance, basic sentences, or a combination of the
above, pertains to the surface structure of sentences. Generative grammarians
often use “basic word order” in an entirely different sense, meaning the order
that permits the simplest syntactic description of the language. The basic word
order is the structure from which all other structures are considered to be de-
rived. For example, McCawley (1970) argues that English is a VSO language
because this is its underlying word order: SVO sentences are the product of
a transformation inverting subject and verb in the underlying VSO clause. It
should be understood that this argument is irrelevant to the typological char-
acterization of English word order. The underlying word order in a language
is not necessarily the same as the pragmatically neutral / statistically dominant
order.
Subsequent works on word order by generative grammarians distinguish
between the underlying basic word order from a generative perspective and
the pragmatically neutral word order in surface structures. It is widely believed
that all VSO languages have an underlying SVO word order, with the verb-first
order produced by movement rules (Carnie and Guilfoyle 2000). This posi-
tion has not broken down the typological distinction between VSO and SVO
languages; on the contrary, current research seeks to explain why the underly-
ing SVO is transformed to VSO in neutral sentences in VSO languages. Both
typological and generative conceptions of basic word order have been invoked
in discussions of BH, as will be shown in §2.2.
8. The ensuing discussion concerns word order in the nonsubordinate clause. Word order
in subordinate clauses is investigated by de Regt (1991), although his definition of the sub-
ordinate clause differs from the one followed in this work (see §2.3). According to de Regt,
the percentage of verb-first subordinate clauses is even higher than verb-first nonsubordinate
clauses. Peretz (1967: 94) states that word order in the relative clause is usually verb-first, as
it is in the subordinate clause.
9. I am indebted to Richard Steiner for drawing my attention to the Malbim references.
Steiner (1998) notes that the medieval Jewish exegetes are divided on the significance of
word-order variation. Baḥye ben Asher (13th century), for example, argues that word order
can affect meaning (1966: 2:415), while Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–164) states that word or-
der variation is meaningless (commentary to Qoh 5:1).
only when they do not exhibit a statistically dominant word order—a situation
not applicable to BH, as we will see.
Most twentieth-century scholars believe that BH does have a basic word
order and that a pragmatic explanation should be sought only for marked word
orders. According to the mainstream view, the basic order is VSO. Exponents
of basic VSO include Brockelmann (1956: §48), Meyer (1972: §91.2), Lam-
bert (1972: §1277), Givón (1977), 10 Bandstra (1982), Muraoka (1985), Waltke
and O’Connor (1990: §8.3), Jongeling (1991), Buth (1995) and de Regt (1991,
2006), among others. Dissenting from this camp and arguing that basic word
order is SVO are several researchers such as Joüon (1947) 11 and Schlesinger
(1953) and, more recently, DeCaen (1995, 1999) and Holmstedt (2002). In
§§2.2.1–2.2.3, I attempt to clarify the points of debate between the VSO and
SVO camps and justify the VSO view. In §2.2.4, I address whether word order
in BH varies according to discourse type, and in §2.2.5, I discuss word order in
the nonverbal and the participial clause.
10. Givón (1977) states that classical BH had a basic word order of VSO and gradually
shifted to SVO in the Exilic Period. He compares the classical texts of Genesis and 2 Kings
to four books usually held to be late, namely, Esther, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and the
Song of Songs. These texts, as Givón admits, differ greatly from the classical texts as well
as from each other in terms of discourse genre and content. Esther is prose narrative, like
Genesis and 2 Kings, while Ecclesiastes belongs to the wisdom-literature genre, and Lam-
entations and the Song of Songs are poetry. As discussed in §1.2, poetic texts often exhibit
a higher frequency of marked word order than prose. Givón’s selection of these four texts as
representative of late BH is particularly puzzling considering the existence of demonstrably
late texts of a much more similar genre to Genesis and Kings, that is, Ezra–Nehemiah and
Chronicles. Contrary to Givón’s conclusion, these books appear to exhibit unmarked VSO
word order, as noted by Buth (1995: 91 n. 11). Additional arguments against Givón’s posi-
tion can be found in Buth (1995: 91).
11. In the revised edition of Joüon by Muraoka ( Joüon-Muraoka §155k), Joüon’s (1947:
§155k) original statement, “L’ordre des mots dans la proposition verbale . . . est normale-
ment: Suject-Verbe” is revised to reflect Muraoka’s support for the standard VSO view (see
§2.2.1.).
book of Genesis, a much larger corpus. The results are similar to Jongeling’s,
with 84% of verbal clauses having nonpreposed word order (see chap. 5). It is
sometimes claimed that figures such as these are misleading because many of
the clauses involved lack an explicit subject and are not really VSO. However,
because BH drops pronominal subjects unless they precede the verb (see §5.1),
one can argue that VO clauses can be classified together with VSO clauses.
The case for this position is particularly strong for consecutive forms, where
the pronoun can only have been dropped from the postverbal position.
In any case, even if only clauses with subjects are included, the evidence
still seems to point to VSO. Jongeling finds that when an explicit subject is
present, the subject precedes the verb in only 20% of the clauses. Hornkohl’s
(2003: 7) M.A. thesis on Genesis reaches a similar conclusion, also including
subordinate clauses in the data: 79% of verbal clauses with an explicit subject
are verb first. 12 The natural conclusion is that the unmarked position for both
subject and object is after the verb.
Some scholars (e.g., Schlesinger 1953; Muraoka 1985: 29; Regt 1991: 160)
are of the opinion that sentences with a waw-consecutive verb form (wayyiqtol/
weqatal) should not be considered in determining basic word order. A reason
given for excluding this type of clause is that the subject necessarily follows
the verb in these clauses (Muraoka 1985: 28). 13 Fleshing this statement out, the
argument would seem to go something like this: the consecutive form is not
just a “positional variant” (Revell 1989b: 32) of the simple form but has se-
mantic or pragmatic significance of its own. A sentence involving this seman-
tic/pragmatic factor (let us call it x) necessarily contains a consecutive form
and, ipso facto, verb-first word order; only clauses lacking this factor exhibit
word-order variation. According to this logic, including consecutive forms in
the data inappropriately skews the results in favor of VSO word order.
What exactly x represents is unclear; but it certainly is not the most obvious
candidate, temporal sequentiality. As will be discussed in §3.2, “consecutive”
forms are not always sequential, nor must a clause relating a sequential event
contain a consecutive form. A simpler explanation of the consecutive/simple-
verb distribution is that verb form is conditioned on word order. The consecu-
tive form is a positional variant of the simple form that is used whenever the
verb immediately follows a conjunction. If any element intervenes between
conjunction and verb, whether a negative particle, clausal adverb, or preposed
constituent, a simple form is selected. As Blau (1993: §60) writes, 14
12. This figure was obtained by combining the figures for verb-first order in narrative
and direct speech, calculated separately by Hornkohl.
13. DeCaen (1995, 1999) and Holmstedt (2002, 2005) argue for the omission of con-
secutive forms on other grounds; for discussion, see §2.2.2.
14. See also Bergsträsser (1962: §6c); Revell (1989b: 3).
The tenses with consecutive waw (wayyqtl, weqtl ) are used whenever the syntac-
tic environment permits the use of waw copulative; otherwise the simple tenses
(qtl, yqtl ) [are used].
It follows from this that eliminating consecutive forms from a text count is
statistically invalid, skewing the results in favor of SVO by eliminating many
VSO clauses from the data. Most clauses in BH start with the conjunction,
particularly in narrative texts, but to a lesser extent in direct speech as well. I
found that in Genesis more than 99% of clauses in narrative have a conjunc-
tion, and 65% in direct speech. The vast majority of VSO clauses (excluding
those containing preverbal particles), then, will necessarily have a consecutive
form and would not be counted.
In his examination of word order, Muraoka (1985: 30–31) excludes consec-
utive forms and restricts his count to a sample of conversational texts, in which
the frequency of SVO word order is significantly higher than in narrative texts.
Although he concludes that VSO order is nonetheless statistically dominant,
this result is not directly relevant to the present study because in Muraoka’s
study all orders in which the verb precedes the subject, including object-first
(OVS) and adjunct-first (AVS) orders, are counted as having “normal” (that is,
relative-VS) order. Hornkohl (2003: 8–10) examines the issue from a different
angle, reasoning that, if BH is in fact an SVO language and the predominance
of VSO is only due to the widespread use of consecutive forms, one would
expect to find SVO as the dominant order in clauses in which consecutive
forms are grammatically constrained from appearing due to the presence of an
initial particle or subordinating conjunction at the head of the clause. Hornkohl
counts all of these clauses in Genesis and shows that, contrary to the SVO hy-
pothesis, VSO is the most frequent word order: 76% of narrative clauses and
58% of direct-speech clauses are verb-first, with an overall frequency of 66%
verb-first word order. 15 It can be concluded that the textual-frequency criterion,
however it is defined, leads to the firm conclusion that basic word order in the
BH finite clause is VSO. 16
15. I have calculated these percentages using Hornkohl’s raw statistics. The percentages
given by Hornkohl (2003: 8) differ somewhat because he eliminates clauses without an overt
subject.
16. On word order in the nonverbal and participial clause, see §2.2.4.
17. DeCaen’s main interest, however, is in basic word order from the generative per-
spective, as will be discussed in §2.2.3.
the basic-sentence criterion leads to the rejection of VSO as the basic order for
BH. Coordinated clauses are not basic sentences and are excluded from con-
sideration; thus, clauses with consecutive forms, the most common VSO type,
are not considered in determining basic word order. An additional category
that is omitted in the basic-sentence criterion is the modal clause. Citing Nic-
cacci (1987) and Revell (1989b), DeCaen (1995: 24) asserts that clauses with
modal imperfects, jussives, or imperatives have VSO order, whereas clauses
with indicative imperfects have SVO order. 18 Because only indicative clauses
are basic sentences, it follows that SVO is the basic word order. More precisely,
DeCaen’s conclusion is that BH is a verb-second (V2) language, like German,
which requires the verb to be in second place in the clause, whether the first
element is the subject or a different element (DeCaen 1995: 24). 19
DeCaen explains the verb-initial (V1) order characteristic of modal clauses
by noting that the modal category is marked relative to the indicative category.
According to DeCaen (1995: 111–22), the verb form found in wayyiqtol is
actually a modal form; in addition, he posits that the doubling of the initial
prefix represents a complementizer signifying modality (1995: 128–229, 296).
The modal nature of wayyiqtol explains why these forms always have V1 or-
der. Although this interpretation of the consecutive form is certainly open to
challenge, the more fundamental point for present purposes is the connection
drawn between modality and marked word order. Modality is a semantic fea-
ture of the verb that does not vary with discourse context and is independent
of pragmatic neutrality. Although modal verbs are marked in comparison to
indcative verbs, this has nothing to do with whether clauses with modal verbs
are pragmatically marked. In other words, the fact that modal clauses are gen-
erally VSO is perfectly compatible with the VSO basic word-order hypothesis.
What is more critical to the V2 argument is whether indicative clauses are in
fact always or most often SVO.
The latter issue is addressed by Holmstedt (2002). Holmstedt’s (2002: 139)
count of indicative clauses in Genesis (including subordinate clauses but
excluding clauses without overt subjects and excluding wayyiqtol clauses) 20
shows that a slim majority actually have VSO order, with 303 out of 554 clauses
(55%) being VSO. Holmstedt, however, argues that many of these clauses,
such as the subordinate ones, should not be counted because they do not sat-
18. The claim regarding indicative clauses, of course, does not include the most com-
mon indicative clause type, the clause with a consecutive form. For further discussion of this
view, see §3.3.4.
19. According to DeCaen, BH is V1 in subordinate clauses, which typically have verb-
first order.
20. Holmstedt excludes clauses with wayyiqtol due to their “unique morphological char-
acteristics” (2002: 133); see §2.2.3 for his explanation of why clauses with wayyiqtol always
have VSO order.
21. In the following summary I rely on Holmstedt (2005), which is the clearest presenta-
tion of his methodology, although the corpus analyzed there is Proverbs.
22. It can be objected that clauses in a contrastive context need not be marked, even if
BH uses word order to mark contrast: the use of a marked construction is always optional,
because the neutral word order is always available. It is not known how often pragmatically
marked constructions are used in contexts that permit these constructions.
23. The effect is particularly extreme on narrative indicative clauses, where 84 out of the
103 must be omitted. When an additional clause in the data is omitted for technical reasons,
the result is 15 SV clauses out of 18 (83%). In direct speech, omitting the potentially marked
clauses as well as a few found in poetic passages and several others disqualified on syntactic
grounds yields 28 SV clauses out of 47, or 60%.
24. Buth (1995: 80–81) argues against an underlying SVO, pointing out that SVO lan-
guages such as English typically have OSV as the marked construction, derived by moving
the object to initial position. In BH, OSV word order is almost unheard of; the orders that
appear are SVO and OVS. Although this argument seems highly attractive, the generative
grammarian can account for the discrepancy between English and BH by positing minor dif-
ferences in the underlying SVO structure of the two languages.
2.3. Conclusion
In conclusion, basic word order in the typological sense is the pragmatically
unmarked order. Basic word order is usually established by the criterion of
statistical dominance. The mainstream view that BH is typologically VSO is
strongly supported by the statistical evidence. BH, like other VSO languages,
has an underlying SVO word order from the generative perspective, but this
fact does not affect the typological classification of the language. Basic word
order in BH does not vary according to discourse genre.
This chapter reviews prior studies of the function of preposing in BH. Given
that VSO is the unmarked word order in BH, preposed word orders such as
SVO and OVS can be assumed to have pragmatic functions. The pragmatic
significance of postverbal word order is outside the scope of this study and is
not addressed here. 1
Three general models of preposing can be identified in the literature, each
involving a central concept that motivates all or most preposing: emphasis,
backgrounding, and information structure. The three concepts do not all have
the same scope. Emphasis is not thought to explain all preposed clauses, while
universal scope is sometimes claimed for backgrounding. There is a multitude
of variations of each model, and the approaches of some researchers do not
fit neatly into a single model. Nevertheless, I believe that grouping all of the
approaches into three categories is helpful in making sense of the bewildering
variety of explanations that have been offered for preposing.
1. Studies discussing postverbal word order in BH include Lode (1984, 1988); Rosen-
baum (1997); Heimerdinger (1999).
18
1980: 391–400), while prose chiasmus is restricted to the VSO-SVO/OVS type. On the use
of stylistic devices such as chiasmus in prose, see §8.5.
6. See §8.5 for further discussion of repeated-verb structures.
7. See also Malbim (1973: §§111–14).
8. See also GKC (§§141e, 142a); Ewald (1879: §306c); Müller (1888: §§131, 151);
Driver (1892: §156); Davidson (1901: §150).
9. According to Joosten (2002), there are more than 170 examples of circumstantial claus-
es with a predicative participle in Genesis, Josh 1–10, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings;
In the finite circumstantial clause, the subject precedes the verb, mimicking the
subject-predicate order found in the nonfinite circumstantial clause.
Several scholars, including Ewald (1879: §306c), Müller (1888: §§130–
31), and Davidson (1901: §105), link word order in the finite circumstantial
clause to the emphasis principle. Because the circumstantial clause describes a
state rather than an action, the verb is de-emphasized relative to the subject and
hence follows it. S. R. Driver (1892: §160 obs.) and Muraoka (1985: 33), how-
ever, see emphasis and circumstantiality as separate categories. Driver (1892:
§157) and GKC (§141e) link circumstantiality to contrast.
In the classic sense, the circumstantial clause is one that refers to a con-
comitant state or event, that is, an accompanying state or event simultaneous
with the previous clause. The circumstantial clause is viewed as semantically
subordinate to the preceding clause, despite being coordinate on the gram-
matical level. A nonfinite example is (3), above, which can be rendered by a
subordinate clause, ‘while he was sitting’. 10 Oddly, though, it is hard to find
finite clauses of this type. Joosten (2002) points out that a finite clause describ-
ing a concomitant event should contain an imperfect verb; as he shows, there
are hardly any clauses of this type. Although a number of concomitant finite
clauses with perfects are cited in the literature, most of these are not found in
a narrative context but occur in direct speech, following a rhetorical question
or a request: 11
(4) Gen 18:13
:למה זה צחקה שׂרה לאמר האף אמנם אלד ואני זקנתי
Why did Sarah laugh, saying, “Shall I indeed bear a child, and I am old?”
I will argue in §7.3.2.1 that this type of preposing does not mark circumstan-
tiality but is a special construction that marks the justification for a preceding
utterance. All in all, it would appear that the finite circumstantial clause in the
classic sense is something of a phantom. 12
another action.” The preperfect category includes many clauses that are more commonly
considered simultaneous.
16. See also Williams (1976: §573).
17. According to GKC (§164), a sequence of perfects refers to a rapid sequence of events,
citing as evidence many of the same verses as does Joüon. See also König (1897: §119).
18. See also Mirsky (1977; 1999: 11–36), who states that the ends of verses and larger
thematic units are often marked by change of word order. By this, Mirsky means not neces-
sarily preposing but inversion of whatever word order is exhibited in previous clauses within
the unit. Although in most of Mirsky’s examples the unit ends with a preposed clause, in two
cases the clauses within the unit exhibit preposed order, and the last clause exhibits verb-
first order (Pss 22:24, 23:2–3). Many of his examples are from poetry or nonverbal clauses,
although he does cite several cases involving preposed nonsubordinate finite clauses in the
classical BH prose corpus, including Gen 19:3, 23:15; Deut 17:17; Josh 16:8; 2 Kgs 4:4. It
should be noted that several of these can be alternately explained as topicalized or focused
clauses, as defined in the present work. I am indebted to Uri Mor for the Mirsky reference.
19. Givón (1983: 8) attempts to quantify the description of the paragraph, stating that
the thematic paragraph is linked “in a statistically significant but not absolute fashion” to the
quantitative concept of “topic continuity.” Every noun phrase is considered by Givón to be
a topic. Continuity and discontinuity are coded by a number of means including word order,
morphology, and phonology. Discontinuous topics are generally coded by full noun phrases
3.1.4. Attraction
Several scholars claim that preposing may result from a process of “attrac-
tion.” According to Malbim (1973: §115), when an object at the end of one
clause is the same as the subject in the next clause, preposed word order may
result:
or accented independent pronouns, whereas continuous topics are coded by unaccented inde-
pendent pronouns, clitic pronouns, verb agreement, or zero anaphora (1983: 31–32). In verb-
first languages, preposing is also used to code discontinuity (1983: 33). Paragraphs generally
open with a discontinuous topic and generally exhibit continuity of the main topic within the
paragraph (1983: 9). For a study of topic continuity in BH, see Fox (1983).
20. See, e.g., Lundbom (1999: 74); Tov (2001: 50–51); Hoop (2003: 3–4). I am indebted
to Richard Steiner for the Lundbom reference.
3.1.7. Conclusion
Emphasis is widely viewed nowadays as a frustratingly subjective con-
cept, despite Muraoka’s efforts to give the concept a modern linguistic inter-
pretation. Perhaps the main contribution of the emphasis-centered model is
the categorization and description of cases in which preposing is not directly
motivated by emphasis. Many of the functional categories described above,
such as anteriority, simultaneity, and the marking of a new narrative unit, are
significant categories that must be addressed in any comprehensive treatment
21. A more probable explanation of clauses such as these involves the concept of topi-
calization (see §3.3.1.2).
22. These factors are also discussed by Muraoka in his revised version of Joüon’s gram-
mar ( Joüon-Muraoka §155).
23. This was noticed earlier by Bloch (1946: 37), as Muraoka notes.
24. Hopper (1979) supplies a list of criteria differentiating foreground and background:
e.g., the foreground is frequently characterized by temporal succession, perfective verb
forms (not to be confused with the BH perfect), and subject continuity, while the background
is characterized by simultaneity, imperfective verb forms, and changes of subject. Givón
(1987) argues that the foreground/background distinction is conceptually a graded rather
than a binary distinction.
25. According to Longacre, (1982: 459–60; 2003: 57–58), each discourse type, includ-
ing the narrative, predictive/procedural, hortatory, and expository types, has its own scheme
of marking foreground and background. The link between qatal and backgrounding is char-
acteristic of narrative; in predictive discourse the background is marked by yiqtol (1982: 468;
2003: 106). Longacre’s conception of narrative is not in opposition to direct speech; thus,
direct speech in Longacre’s scheme is also classified as belonging to any of the above types,
including narrative (see also Heller 2004: 23). As mentioned in §2.2.4, Longacre (1982: 472)
views the expository discourse type as having a different basic word order than narrative,
based on the fact that expository discourse consists mainly of nominal clauses with subject-
predicate word order.
26. Longacre, however, views qatal as marking background whether the clause has
verb-first or preposed word order. Qatal with a preposed noun is used to “introduce or feature
a participant or prop” (2003: 71), whereas qatal with verb-first word order is used “to pres-
ent a preliminary action.” Longacre’s theory also distinguishes between different degrees
30. By “imperfect,” Givón means both the consecutive and the simple imperfect. See
also Dempster (1985).
31. Myhill (1995) presents an unconventional description of preposing in clauses with
future time reference: in modal clauses, preposing is used in commands with third-person
animate subjects. In non-modal clauses, preposing marks unilateral good prophecies, neu-
tral prophecies, bad prophecies, unilateral promises, hopes, hostile intentions, bad self-
prophecies, and guesses. Not surprisingly, Myhill (1995: 113) comments: “I cannot say
with absolute certainty that the categories in table 3 [i.e., the nonmodal categories described
above] represent the best possible analysis of these data.”
32. Heimerdinger’s own understanding of the foregrounding concept is different from
the one discussed in this section; a foregrounded element for him is one that is “thrown into
relief by the writer or speaker and is perceived as such by the reader or hearer” (1999: 222).
Thus, clauses in the storyline are not considered foregrounded unless they are specially high-
lighted. According to Heimerdinger, foregrounding in this sense is marked not by specific
clause structures (1999: 239) but by other devices such as repetition and evaluation.
33. Longacre (1989, 1992) addresses this argument by introducing a distinction between
primary and secondary storylines. Perfect clauses carry the secondary storyline, which is
normally background but can be promoted to foreground under certain circumstances.
The backgrounding model assigns the naming of the firstborn child to the fore-
ground and the naming of the second (with qatal ) to the background, although
the second child turns out to be at least as central to the storyline as the first.
The temporal-sequencing model succeeds in accounting for anterior and
simultaneous clauses, as well as many parenthetical clauses. It is also able to
incorporate many contrastive clause pairs, which frequently involve simulta-
neous events. However, the claim that preposing always marks nonsequenti-
34. See also the discussion and further references in Waltke and O’Connor (1990:
§33.2.3). Hatav (1997: 57) has defended the link between wayyiqtol and sequentiality, stat-
ing that her study of wayyiqtol forms in classical Hebrew prose shows that only 6% of 2,445
wayyiqtol clauses are clearly nonsequential (see also Hatav 2000b). Heller (2004: 430) also
believes there is a consistent link between wayyiqtol and sequentiality. According to Cook
(2004: 264), the high degree of correlation between wayyiqtol and sequentiality is due to
the fact that wayyiqtol is a narrative verb and the fact that temporal succession is the natural
order in narrative.
35. Representative examples from Genesis are Gen 4:18; 10:24, 25, 26–29; 11:27; 14:4;
15:17; 18:7; 19:6, 10.
36. The term “information structure” was introduced by Halliday (1967). Syntactic and
prosodic structures that mark information structure are sometimes known as information-
packaging devices because they organize the informational content of the sentence in a
manner appropriate to the context. For this term, see, e.g., Chafe (1976); Vallduví (1992);
McNally (1998).
37. Information structure has also been applied to the study of Modern Hebrew word
order; see, e.g., Bendavid (1958); Ben-Horin (1976); Rosén (1977: 322–24; 1982); Giora
(1982); Nir and Roeh (1984); Ziv (1988); Glinert (1989: §37); Kuzar (1989, 2002); Azar
(1993).
a sentence which most directly evokes the discourse topic which is relevant in
the current sentence.” 42
The various definitions of topic remain problematic. The most accepted
conception of topic, the notion of “aboutness,” has thus far resisted objective
formulation, despite valiant efforts on the part of many researchers. Gómez-
González (2001: 31) sums up the state of the field as follows: “the intricacies
raised by the numerous and heterogeneous variations of the semantic interpre-
tation have led many scholars to conclude that Theme/Topic in terms of about-
ness cannot be regarded as an objectively identifiable unique category, but as a
clearly intuitive, and therefore subjective concept.”
3.3.1.2. Topicalization
The term topicalization first appears in Ross (1967: 115) as the name for
the English preposing transformation. 43 This transformation moves a noninitial
expression to the head of the clause, yielding a structure such as Cake, I eat
with a spoon. 44 The term topicalization is also used to refer to the structure
produced by the topicalization transformation. It was noticed later by Gundel
(1977: 134–35; 1985: 88 n. 10) and others that the topicalization construction
exhibits two distinct accentuation patterns. 45 The first has the primary accent
on an element other than the preposed constituent, for example, Cake, I eat
with a spoon. 46 A second pattern, restricted to the casual register, has the pri-
mary accent on the preposed element: Cake I asked for, not pie. This type of
sentence marks the preposed constituent as the focus, that is, the new informa-
tion in the clause (see §3.3.1.3). It has become customary to reserve the term
topicalization for the former syntactic-prosodic pattern; the latter pattern is
termed focus-movement or focusing (see §3.3.1.3). 47
in Functional Grammar research. Critical analyses of the concept of discourse topic can be
found in Brown and Yule (1983: 68–124) and Gómez-González (2001: 25–31).
42. Further exploration of the relation between sentence topic and discourse topic can be
found in Goutsos (1997) and in Floor’s (2004) dissertation on BH.
43. Postal (1971: 142) calls this transformation “Y-Movement,” on the grounds that the
resulting sentences are similar to those found in Yiddish. Further discussion of the transfor-
mation and its syntactic constraints can be found in Chomsky (1977).
44. Although Ross’s topicalization includes only preposed NPs, this definition was lat-
er broadened by some to include preposed adverbs and prepositional phrases as well. See
Prince (1986: 210, example 3).
45. See also Creider (1979: 4 n. 1) and Prince (1986: 209); Ben-Horin (1976) describes
corresponding constructions in Modern Hebrew.
46. There is typically a secondary accent on the preposed “cake” as well.
47. Prince distinguishes a third preposing construction in English that she calls
“Yiddish-Movement”; for example, “Can you imagine? Such a rich woman and after all
I’ve done for her, a shirt she gave my Harry when he was bar mitsved.” Yiddish-movement
is syntactically and prosodically identical to focus-movement but is dialectically restricted
with different pragmatic characteristics (see §6.1.2 n. 9).
48. See also Myhill (1985: 181) and Bailey and Levinsohn (1992).
49. See Halliday (1967: 211–23), who terms this function “thematization.” A similar
view can be found in Lambrecht (1994: 147; see also p. 161). For a review of Lambrecht’s
work, including his views on topic, see Ziv (1996b).
50. Verbs are in all but exceptional circumstances part of the rheme, irrespective of the
language involved; hence, unmarked clauses in verb-first languages begin with a component
of the rheme and not the theme.
51. Gundel uses the term semantic focus instead of informational focus.
52. The term focus denoting new information was introduced by Halliday (1967) and
further developed by Chomsky (1970), Jackendoff (1972), Rochemont (1986), and others.
The given information is often termed the “presupposition.” I will not use this term due to the
possibility of confusion with the concept of pragmatic presupposition (see chap. 4, pp. 48ff.).
Focus is related to rheme, if rheme is defined in informational terms (see §3.3.1.1); focus,
however, is usually understood as comprising only part of the rheme.
53. For the sake of convenience, the term focus is used in this work to denote both the
new value for X (“Bill”), as well as the linguistic expression in the sentence that represents
this new value (Bill ). Propositions and the values of the variables they contain are marked by
double quotation marks, and linguistic expressions are in italic type.
3.3.3. Bandstra
Bandstra’s dissertation on ( כי1982: 72–88) appears to be the first work to
present a systematic model of BH preposing based on the concepts of topical-
ization and focusing. 56 Bandstra writes that the topic is the given part of the
clause, “that part of the clause that represents the writer’s thematic choice, that
about which he will say something new” (1982: 74). According to Bandstra, the
topicalization construction marks a topic mentioned in the preceding material
in order to maintain continuity in the text. This category accounts for preposing
traditionally attributed to attraction. Focusing, according to Bandstra, involves
new, unexpected information, or a change in topic (1982: 78). Focusing in this
conception subsumes the traditional “emphasis” and “contrast” categories.
Bandstra’s conception of focus is closest to contrastive focus (see §3.3.1.3):
any preposed constituent that is not continuous with the preceding material is
termed a focus, including contrastive topics. Topicalization is restricted to the
continuative type of preposing (see §3.3.1.2). In a later article (1992), Bandstra
expands the concept of topicalization to include focusing as well. Topicaliza-
tion is described as the placing of new information in the initial slot, which
signals discontinuity or transition; it also is said to include cases in which the
topicalized element is not new, but is fronted in order to provide continuity.
It is not clear how the apparently contradictory categories of continuity and
discontinuity are unified under a single heading.
3.3.4. Revell
Revell (1989a: 2) invokes the concept of attentional focus in his explana-
tion of BH word order, although he does not refer specifically to the linguistic
literature on focusing. As mentioned in §2.2, Revell believes that word order in
every clause, not just in preposed clauses, is pragmatically motivated; in other
words, BH is apparently viewed as a free word-order language. He states that
“the constituent placed first in the clause is that which the author wishes to be
the primary focus of the reader’s attention.” He lists various types of elements
to which the author might choose to draw attention, including a new subject,
the time or place of the action at the beginning of a narrative, information
56. Bandstra was not, however, the first to invoke the concepts of topicalization and
focusing in reference to BH, contrary to van der Merwe (1990: 42). O’Connor (1980: 81,
306–7) discusses the concepts of “focus-marking” and “topicalization” but does not explore
the ramifications for preposing.
57. Cook’s statement “word order is grammatically relevant in Biblical Hebrew: it dis-
tinguishes between modal and indicative verbs” (2004: 265) is made possible only by his
reinterpretation of weqatal as a modal form. Even with this adjustment, the most common
indicative verb form, wayyiqtol, is excluded from the VX-modal/XV-indicative scheme. On
the relevance of modality to the question of BH basic word order, see §2.2.
58. For examples of XV clauses containing volitive forms in Genesis, see §5.1, p. 65
nn. 2-4.
59. Rosenbaum (1997) has applied the Functional Grammar framework to BH poetry.
60. In an earlier version of the theory (Dik 1980), topicality is defined as what the sen-
tence is about.
61. See also de Jong (1981) and Dik et al. (1981). For critical discussion of Topic and
Focus in Functional Grammar, see, e.g., Siewierska (1991); Bolkestein (1998).
62. On the distinction between Topic and Setting, see Hannay (1991: 146). On Setting in
BH, see also Rosenbaum 1997: 41–44. Winther-Nielsen (1992) cites Gen 1:1 as an example
of preposing to mark Setting in BH.
63. The synthesis of topic and background is most fully explained in Buth’s later ar-
ticles, although it is clearly present as early as his 1987 dissertation.
64. Levinsohn (1990) describes BH topicalization as the marking of discontinuity: the
discontinuity may concern a switch in participants, or a switch in the thematic or temporal
progression of the story. See also Levinsohn’s earlier (1987) discussion of word order and
discontinuity in the book of Acts. The debt to Levinsohn is acknowledged in Buth (1995: 97
n. 14). Levinsohn, however, does not feel that background is a useful concept with respect to
preposing. In Bailey and Levinsohn (1992), the thesis is advanced that all preposing is either
focusing or topicalization.
65. A precedent for this paradigm is Lambdin (1971: §132), for whom we- + verb (VSO)
signifies a “conjunctive-sequential” clause, and waw + nonverb (SVO/OVS) signals a “dis-
junctive” clause. Disjunctive clauses may be contrastive, circumstantial, explanatory, par-
enthetical, terminative, or initial (see also Waltke and O’Connor 1990: §§8.3, 39.21–23).
66. The main conclusions of Gross (1996) are summarized in Gross (1999) and in a re-
view article by van der Merwe (1999c). The monograph on double preposing is examined in
a review article by Bailey (2004). The discussion in this section focuses on the conclusions
of the 1996 monograph, because the pragmatics of double preposing, as well as the functions
of preposing in poetry, are outside the scope of this study (see §§1.2 and 5.4.2).
one or more items. Certain conjunctions, “clause deictics” and “text deictics,”
and clausal adverbs relate to the entire sentence and always stand at the outer
edge of the preverbal field. A number of other syntactic categories are always
or usually in the preverbal field, including interrogative particles and deictic
particles such as שם, כן, כה, זה, and אז.
Gross (1996: 53–66) discusses the concept of theme (topic) extensively,
but does not make use of it in his pragmatic description of preposing. He uses
topicalization as a purely syntactic term referring to a preposed structure. On
the pragmatic level, preposing is analyzed primarily in terms of focus. In defin-
ing focus, Gross (1996: 66–72) utilizes J. Jacobs’s relational view, in which an
element is considered a focus if that element was chosen from a set of potential
referents. 67 This conception of focus closely resembles Chafe’s (1976) defini-
tion of contrastive focus (see §3.3.1.3 above). A sentence is allowed by Gross
to have multiple focuses.
Gross (1996; 1999: 40–45) describes a number of other circumstances,
aside from focusing, in which preposing occurs. A temporal adjunct may be
preposed without being focused. A nonfocused subject may be preposed at the
beginning of a narrative or quoted speech, 68 in an answer to a discourse-initial
request, 69 in a background description, in “authorial commentary” within a
narrative, or in “supplement” information (e.g., an anterior event). Additional
reasons for preposing are “connection,” in which the preposed item is identical
to an item in the previous clause, and “enumeration,” which is an “on-the-one-
hand/on-the-other” or “neither-nor” construction. 70
Van der Merwe (1999c: 290) points out that because he omits the notion of
topic from his pragmatic analysis of preposing, Gross is unable to provide a
comprehensive account of preposing: “the complexity of his findings . . . and
the number of cases that he has to leave out of consideration . . . indicate that
his notional category of focus can explain only one aspect of his data.” This
criticism is taken into account in Gross’s 2001 monograph, in which the con-
cept of topic is identified as one of the functions of preposing (2001a: 310).
model appears in van der Merwe (1999b) and van der Merwe and Talstra
(2002–3: 83). 72 Floor (2003, 2004) follows Lambrecht and Heimerdinger in
his overall approach. 73 Another work influenced by Lambrecht is Shimasaki’s
(2002) revision of his 1999 dissertation. 74 An additional scholar who applies
Lambrecht’s framework to BH is Bailey (2004), in a review article on Gross
(2001). Lunn has applied Lambrecht’s model to BH poetry in his (2006) revi-
sion of his 2004 dissertation.
Topic for Lambrecht is what the sentence is about. Focus is defined in in-
formational terms as “the element of information whereby the presupposition
and the assertion differ from each other” (1994: 207), 75 in other words, focus is
the information conveyed by the sentence, minus the portion that the addressee
already knows. According to Lambrecht sentences must have a focus, but may
have no topic, one topic, or more than one.
Lambrecht combines focus and topic structures into a single prosodic para-
digm. 76 Most sentences can be categorized as having one of three focus/topic
articulations, each having a characteristic accentuation pattern (the main ac-
cent in the clause is marked by bold type):
72. Van der Merwe (1999b) cites Heimerdinger as a reference. Van der Merwe’s ap-
proach to BH word has evolved over the years. In van der Merwe (1989, 1991), preposing
is described as marking topic or focus. Like Gross, Van der Merwe defines focus as “a
particular item from a number of possible alternatives” (van der Merwe 1989: 128). Topic is
“that part of a sentence which determines the frame of interpretation” (1989: 128). Topics are
marked by preposing in cases of contrastive topics, new topics, and interruptions of narrative
sequences. In van der Merwe et al. (1999: §47), the functions of preposing are described as
marking focus, marking a new or reactivated topic, and marking a simultaneous or nearly
simultaneous event. Focus is defined there as “the most salient information conveyed by a
particular utterance,” a definition closest to attentional focus.
73. Floor (2003, 2004) elaborates on the category of topic, distinguishing four sub-
categories, and shows that marked word-order constructions contribute to the development
of discourse themes.
74. For a review of Shimasaki, see Holmstedt (2003).
75. Lambrecht (1994: 52) defines the (pragmatic) presupposition of a sentence as “the
set of propositions lexicogrammatically evoked in a sentence which the speaker assumes the
addressee already knows or is ready to take for granted at the time the sentence is uttered”
(this definition is slightly modified later on in the book). Some problems with Lambrecht’s
definition of focus are discussed in Dryer (1996: 517).
76. For Lambrecht, focus/presupposition and topic/comment are closely related notions;
thus, the predicate-focus clause can also be described as having “topic-comment” structure,
where the subject is the topic and the predicate (the focus) is the comment. Sentence-focus
structures are those that have a comment and no topic. Further comments on this paradigm
appear in §6.1.1.
77. See Lambrecht (1994: 222–23).
Predicate focus is the unmarked articulation, and argument and sentence focus
the pragmatically marked types. In predicate focus, the focus is “projected”
from a constituent within the verb phrase to include the entire verb phrase. 78
Thus, although only the word down is accented in (11a), the focus is the verb
phrase broke down. The predicate-focus structure is also a topic-comment
structure: the subject is the topic and the verb phrase the comment. In the
argument-focus articulation, the accent is on the focused argument; in (11b),
the focus is the subject my car. In sentence focus, the entire sentence is the fo-
cus and simultaneously the comment: sentence-focus sentences have no topic.
Sentence focus in intransitive clauses is marked by an accent on the subject, as
in (11c); 79 the focus is projected from the subject to include the entire sentence.
The sentence-focus articulation, as in (11c), is identical to the argument-focus
articulation with a focused subject, as in (11b): in both of these articulations,
the accent is on the subject.
According to Lambrecht (1994: 138–40), the sentence-focus category in-
cludes two types of sentences: “presentational” and “event-reporting” sen-
tences. Presentational sentences indicate the existence of a referent (e.g., There
was a man), or the appearance of a new referent in the discourse (e.g., John
arrived). Event-reporting sentences announce an event concerning a referent
new to the discourse (Lambrecht 1994: 14), (e.g., My car broke down.) Lam-
brecht explains that both of these types are “thetic judgments,” that is, sen-
tences that simply recognize a fact, as opposed to the ordinary sentence, which
involves both recognizing a subject and recognizing what is expressed about
the subject by the predicate. 80
The intriguing identity between argument- and sentence-focus articulations 81
in Lambrecht’s paradigm leads Heimerdinger, van der Merwe and Shimasaki
78. On focus projection, see Halliday (1967: 208); Chomsky (1970: 92–93); Ladd (1980:
74); Selkirk (1995: 554); Gussenhoven (1999).
79. On this sentence pattern, see Schmerling (1976: 22).
80. See Kuroda (1972). Kuno (1972) calls sentence-focus sentences “neutral descrip-
tions.”
81. It should be noted that argument-focus (with a focused subject) and sentence-focus
articulations are identical only for intransitive clauses. In transitive sentence-focus sentenc-
es, both subject and complement are accented: The children went to school. See, e.g., Selkirk
(1995: 556) and Lambrecht (1994: 121, example 4.2d). This accentuation pattern is identical
with the predicate-focus articulation, rather than the argument-focus articulation. However,
in a later work Lambrecht (2000: 620–21) argues that transitive thetic sentences with a lexi-
cal subject and object should be excluded from the sentence-focus category, thereby preserv-
ing the identity between subject- and sentence-focus articulations.
82. It should be noted Lambrecht did not intend his paradigm to cover these pragmatic
sentence types. He also recognizes a separate “contrastive topic” accentual pattern; that is,
The children went to school, and the parents went to bed (1994: 124, 291–95).
3.4. Conclusion
As the the emphasis-centered model has largely fallen out of favor, back-
grounding/temporal-sequencing and information-structure models dominate
the field of contemporary research on BH word order. In the backgrounding
model and the temporal-sequencing variation of this model, preposing is seen
as marking a characteristic relating to the clause as a whole. These models fall
short of a global paradigm for word order but succeed in explaining some types
of subject-preposing, including parenthetical remarks, anterior clauses, and (in
the case of the temporal-sequencing model) simultaneous clause pairs. The use
of preposing to mark a new narrative unit cannot necessarily be incorporated
in the background concept; however, this function has in common with back-
grounding functions the characteristic that it pertains to the clause as a whole
rather than to the preposed constituent.
In the information-structure approach, the function of preposing is seen as
relating specifically to the preposed constituent. Focusing and topicalization
together account for all of the clauses formerly considered emphatic, contras-
88. SV clauses falling into alternate pragmatic categories already identified, such as si-
multaneous clauses, parenthetical clauses, or topicalization, were eliminated from the count,
because the category of sentence focus is not needed to explain the marked word order in
these cases. The remaining SV clauses are Gen 46:31, 47:1, 48:2; Josh 2:2; Judg 13:6; 1 Sam
23:27; 1 Kgs 13:1; and 2 Kgs 4:42.
89. As explained in §2.1, marking a pragmatic category by preposing is always a choice
made by the speaker/writer; thus, even if preposing could be used to mark sentence-focus,
this does not mean that every sentence with a sentence-focus interpretation, or even the ma-
jority of these sentences, would necessarily be preposed.
tive, or due to attraction. The division of labor between focusing and topical-
ization is a matter of debate among Hebraists, mirroring a variety of opinions
found in the general linguistic literature. Scholars disagree as to whether it is
informational, contrastive, or attentional focus that is relevant to preposing. An
additional point of disagreement is whether topicalization marks continuity,
discontinuity, or both.
Like the backgrounding/temporal-sequencing models, the information-
structure model cannot serve as a comprehensive framework for BH word
order. Preposing to mark anteriority or simultaneity does not fit either the topi-
calization or the focusing category, nor does preposing clauses marking the be-
ginning of a narrative unit. Although an attempt has been made to integrate the
backgrounding and information-structure models in a global “discontinuity”
paradigm, the two models seem to concern two fundamentally different types
of pragmatic functions. It is likely that both information-structure functions
and backgrounding-type functions are involved in the preposing phenomenon.
It is not clear, however, which type of function is widespread in the biblical
corpus.
The present study explores the significance of information-structure func-
tions for preposing in BH. The concepts of focusing and topicalization are
clarified and redefined so that they provide insights into when and why prepos-
ing occurs. A sample of preposed clauses is examined to determine whether
information-structure functions are statistically dominant or whether functions
that relate to the clause as a whole, such as simultaneity and anteriority, are
the dominant kind. In addition, differences between preposing in narrative and
direct speech are explored. In subsequent chapters, focused and topicalized
clauses are analyzed in detail from the syntactic and the pragmatic perspectives.
48
1. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1729) write that the question whether an orthographic
unit marked by punctuation is a syntactic sentence “may have no determinate answer.”
2. One case that cannot be analyzed in this way is ואת כל חילם ואת כל טפם ואת נשיהם
‘ שבו ויבזו ואת כל אשר בביתAnd all of their wealth and all of their children and their wives
they took captive and took as booty, and everything in the house’ (Gen 34:29). The two verbs
are preceded by a sequence of three coordinated noun phrases and followed by a fourth. The
first and last of the noun phrases, ואת כל חילםand ואת כל אשר בבית, serve as a discontinuous
coordinate complement of the second verb, ויבזו. The intermediate coordinated phrases ואת
כל טפם ואת נשיהםrelate to the first verb שבו. The sense of the sentence is, roughly, ‘they
took captive and took as booty respectively their children and wives, and all of their wealth
and everything in the house’. The interwoven structure of the Hebrew construction makes
it necessary to consider it a single clause with a compound verb phrase rather than two co-
ordinated clauses.
Jussive and imperfect forms are distinct only in Hiphil verbs, in certain weak
verbs (ו″ עand י″ )עin Qal, and in ה″ לverbs in all binyanim.
The nonfinite forms are the infinitive construct ()ל ְכתֹּב, ִ infinitive absolute
()כָּתוֹב, and participle ()כּוֹתֵ ב. Certain forms are ambiguous in theory, capable
of being interpreted as a participle or a perfect (e.g., קָם, ) ָבּא, but these can usu-
ally be disambiguated in context based on the meaning of the clause in context.
3. In this study, I use the term nonsubordinate, rather than independent, because the
latter is sometimes used to refer to a clause that is not coordinated with other clauses. A
nonsubordinate clause, in contrast, may be coordinated with another clause.
finite subordinate clause, because nonfinite subordinate clauses are in any case
excluded from the data.
4. See, e.g., Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 598–601). I differ from Huddleston and Pul-
lum in regarding particles as prepositions only when they have a complement; when they
occur alone, I retain the traditional classification as adverbs. Thus, אחרis a preposition in the
phrase ‘ אחר הדברים האלהafter these things’ but an adverb in the clause ‘ ואחר ילדה בתand
afterwards she bore a daughter’ (Gen 30:21).
A finite adjunct clause may express the semantic categories of time, cause,
condition, or purpose, as discussed in §§4.3.2.1–4.3.2.4. The various semantic
types can in some cases be distinguished by their characteristic subordinators.
4.3.2.1. The conditional adjunct clause
Conditional clauses are marked by the subordinators אםand כי. Hypotheti-
cal conditionals are marked by the subordinator לו, and negative hypotheticals
by לולי. An example of each subordinator is shown in (18)–(21).
(18) אם
:אם אמצא בסדם חמשים צדיקם בתוך העיר ונשׂאתי לכל המקום בעבורם
If I find in Sodom fifty righteous ones within the city, I will forgive
the whole place for their sake. (Gen 18:26)
(19) כי
וכי יגח שור את איש או את אשה ומת סקול יסקל השור ולא יאכל את בשׂרו
If an ox gores a man or a woman and s/he dies, the ox shall be stoned,
and its flesh shall not be eaten. (Exod 21:28)
(20) לו
להמיתנו לא לקח מידנו עלה ומנחה ולא הראנו את כל אלה וכעת′לו חפץ י
לא השמיענו כזאת
If the LORD had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted a burnt
offering and a grain offering at our hands, and would not have shown us
all these things, and he would not now have announced to us such things
as these. (Judg 13:23)
(21) לולא
לולי אלהי אבי אלהי אברהם ופחד יצחק היה לי כי עתה ריקם שלחתני
If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac,
had not been with me, you would have sent me away empty-handed.
(Gen 31:42)
5. Additional examples from the Genesis corpus are Gen 21:23, 26:29, 31:52, and 42:15.
6. According to a different view, אםin oaths should be viewed from a synchronic per-
spective as a negative asseverative particle meaning ‘certainly not’ (see, e.g., GKC §150;
Joüon-Muraoka §166).
7. See also Gen 30:34.
8. In GKC (§151e n. 1), this is suggested as a historical explanation of the optative
use. In Huehnergard’s (1983: 575) view, optative לוdoes not derive from the conditional;
rather, לוwas historically a particle used to mark hypothetical propositions, including those
expressed by unreal conditionals and optative clauses.
Another use of כיis as an adverb meaning ‘but, rather’ (Blau 1993: §104): 10
11. A content clause that is the complement of a verb is also known as an object clause
or an objective complement clause. A content clause can also be the subject of a verb, but
finite examples in BH are rare. On verbal complementation and, in particular, indirect speech
complements, see Miller (2003: 95–129).
12. Other examples (from Joüon-Muraoka §157c) are Exod 11:7, Deut 1:31, 1 Kgs 22:16.
(38) Conditional
:ועזב את אביו ומת
And (= if) he leaves his father, he will die (Gen 44:22)
13. In this case, a volitive verb form is usual.
(39) Purpose
והביאה לי ואכלה
And bring it to me, and (= so) I may eat it (Gen 27:4)
(40) Complement
ואם ידעת ויש בם אנשי חיל
And if you know and (= that) there are capable men among them
(Gen 47:6)
(41) Relative
הבה נבנה לנו עיר ומגדל וראשו בשמים
Let us build a city and a tower and its (= whose) head is in the heavens
(Gen 11:4)
In (42), ויהיis followed by a temporal phrase and then by a finite clause begin-
ning with a coordinator. Example (43) is similar except that the finite clause
lacks the coordinator. In (44), ויהיis followed immediately by a finite clause,
without a coordinator.
In a common analysis of these constructions, the finite clause is taken to be
a subordinate clause functioning as the subject of ויהי. 14 Example (42), in this
view, is best rendered ‘And it came to pass when they were in the field [that]
Cain rose up against his brother’. 15 Alternatively, ויהיcan be considered a sub-
jectless predicate and the finite clause nonsubordinate. The latter analysis is
supported by the fact that finite clauses following ויהיare never marked with a
subordinator such as אשרand frequently begin with the coordinator ו. In keep-
ing with my preference for syntactic classification based on formal criteria, I
adopt the latter approach.
The subjectless interpretation of ויהיconstructions has the additional advan-
tage of avoiding the problem of determining the end-boundary of the purported
subject clause. For example, in Gen 4:8, above, the subject clause would pre-
sumably include the two coordinated clauses describing the event that hap-
pened while they were in the field: ‘And Cain rose up against his brother Abel
and killed him’. In some instances an argument could be made that the entire
following narrative unit should be considered to be one long coordinated sub-
ject clause, as in (45):
14. See, e.g., BDB §1961.2; Longacre (1989: 67); Niccacci (1990: 160). For a survey
of these and other approaches to the syntactic and pragmatic analysis of ויהי, see van der
Merwe (1999a). According to van der Merwe et al. (1999: §44.5), ויהיis a discourse marker
that “anchors an event, state of affairs, scene, episode or narrative to the time line.” In this
analysis, ויהיpresumably does not function as a verb.
15. This analysis assumes that the temporal phrase serves as an adjunct in the matrix
clause. Another possibility is that the temporal phrase belongs to the following finite clause,
as suggested in Steiner (1979: 148). The verse would then be translated ‘And it came to pass
that when they were in the field Cain rose up’. In this interpretation, בהיותם בשדה ויקם קין
is viewed as a clause with a preverbal adjunct connected to its clause by a conjunction (see
§5.5.2). The case for taking the temporal phrase as belonging to the following finite clause
is stronger in cases such as (43), where the finite clause does not start with a conjunction
(Richard Steiner, personal communication).
18. Miller (2003: 120) notes that when an indirect speech quotation is embedded in
direct speech, the subordinator may be omitted; e.g., Gen 12:13.
19. Partee (1973) takes the view that direct speech is syntactically independent in En-
glish. See also the discussion in Munro (1982) and Li (1986).
20. It has been claimed that direct speech quotations, like other complement clauses,
may be introduced by ( כיthe so-called kî recitativum); see, e.g., GKC (§157b); Williams
(1976: §452); Joüon-Muraoka (§157c); Goldenberg (1991: 79–96). According to this view,
כיat the beginning of a direct speech citation belongs to the reporting clause rather than to
the quoted utterance. An example is ( ויאמר כי את שבע כבשת תקח מידיGen 21:30), which
is understood to mean something like “And he said that ‘These seven ewes you shall take
from my hand.’ ” Some other supposed instances of this phenomenon are Gen 29:32; Exod
3:12, 4:25; 1 Kgs 21:6; 2 Kgs 8:13. Other scholars strongly object to the kî recitativum
theory, arguing that כיintroducing direct speech is best interpreted as belonging to the quoted
utterance; see Esh (1957); Schoors (1981: 256–59); Aejmelaeus (1986); Bandstra (1982:
165–66); Miller (2003: 103–15). A look at the conversation preceding the quoted utterance
reveals in almost all cases that כיis one of the following: a causal subordinator (“because”),
a temporal subordinator (“when”) (see §4.3.2.3), or a conjunction (“rather”) (see §4.3.3). For
example, in Gen 21:30, Abraham’s utterance is a response to Abimelek’s preceding question,
“What are these seven ewes. . . ?” Rather than respond to the literal meaning of this question,
Abraham answers the implied question “Why did you put aside these seven ewes. . . ?” His
response is properly rendered, “And he said, ‘Because these seven ewes you will take from
my hand.’ ” Schoors (1981: 258–59) concludes that “the kî recitativum, as a specific syntac-
tic category, should be deleted from grammars and dictionaries.”
21. An example is 2 Kgs 10:15.
22. An example is Gen 42:7.
23. In a similar vein, Quirk et al. (1985: 1023) write that in English “there is a gradient
from direct speech that is clearly independent to direct speech that is clearly integrated into
the clause structure.”
Hatav (2000a) claims that there is a third type of reported speech, “free
direct discourse,” which is marked by לאמר. Unlike direct speech, which pur-
ports to be an exact rendition of the original utterance, free direct discourse
represents “more or less” what the original speaker intended to say and in
some cases does not report speech at all. 24 Miller (2003: 199), however, as-
serts that quotations prefaced by לאמרare direct speech, although they may
be condensed, hypothetical, or fabricated (Miller 2003: 351). 25 Miller (2003:
412–18) presents a number of arguments against Hatav’s view, pointing out
the implausibility of considering divine legislation introduced by לאמרto have
been “flagged by the narrator/writer as not necessarily presented accurately”
(2003: 417). Considering Tannen’s (1986) finding that reported speech is never
an exact representation of the original utterance, it would seem that the לאמר
quotation simply represent the end of the direct speech spectrum in terms of its
distance from the quoted utterances.
Direct speech quotations can be analyzed on two levels: the level of the re-
ported utterance and the level of the reporting clause (Miller 2003: 200–201).
A direct speech quotation functions as a nonsubordinate clause on the level of
the reported utterance, whether or not it is subordinated to the reporting clause.
Due to the uncertainty regarding their syntactic status on the level of the report-
ing utterance, direct speech clauses are analyzed in this study exclusively on
the level of the reported utterance.
24. See also Follingstad (2001: 453–555), who considers quotations introduced by לאמר
as “semi-direct discourse.” The word לאמרaccording to Follingstad indicates that the origi-
nal citation “has been paraphrased, summarized, reinterpreted—i.e., recontextualized—by
the reporting speaker (or narrator), typically with regards to another context” (2001: 546).
25. Even direct speech quotations without לאמרdo not always relate to actual speech
situations, as both Miller (2003: 290–96) and Hatav (2000a: 15) note.
5.1. Preposing
Virtually every verb-first construction can be converted to a preposed one,
although this usually requires alterations beyond a simple word-order change.
If the unmarked clause contains a consecutive verb form, this is replaced with a
simple perfect or imperfect in the preposed construction. The contrast between
the verb forms in unmarked and preposed clauses is illustrated by (48), which
64
has two coordinated clauses, the first unmarked with a consecutive verb and
the second preposed with a perfect:
(50) Imperative 2
והרכש קח לך
And the possessions take for yourself (Gen 14:21)
(51) Jussive 3
ועינכם אל תחס על כליכם
And never mind about your belongings (Gen 45:20)
(52) Cohortative 4
ואני והנער נלכה עד כה
And I and the lad shall go over there (Gen 22:5)
(53) Imperative 5
ואתם האסרו
And you be (= remain) confined (Gen 42:16)
1. Preposed personal pronouns are quite common; representative examples from the
Genesis corpus include 10:8, 10:9, 14:23, 15:15, and 33:3.
2. Preposing with imperatives is not uncommon; examples from Genesis include 6:21;
8:17; 14:21; 19:12, 17; 20:13, 15; 23:6, 15; 24:60; 31:16, 32; 42:16, 18, 19, 33 (2×); 43:11,
12, 13; 44:17; 45:17, 19; 47:6.
3. Examples from Genesis include 1:22, 37:27, 44:33, and 45:20.
4. Examples from Genesis include 22:5 and 33:14.
5. Other representative examples are Gen 24:60, 42:19, and 44:17.
(56) Subject
וכוש ילד את נמרד
And Cush fathered Nimrod (Gen 10:8)
(57) Complement
ואת הצפר לא בתר
And the bird he did not cut in two (Gen 15:10)
(58) Adjunct
בעוד שלשת ימים ישא פרעה את ראשך מעליך
In another three days Pharaoh will lift up your head from you (Gen
40:19)
The syntactic category of the preposed constituent may be noun phrase, prepo-
sitional phrase, adverb, or adjective:
(61) Adverb
:שמה קבר אברהם ושרה אשתו
There Abraham and his wife Sarah were buried (Gen 25:10)
(62) Adjective
תמים היה בדרתיו
Blameless was He in his generation (Gen 6:9)
Preposing is normally performed on an entire clause-level constituent.
When the constituent involved is a compound phrase, there are several prepos-
ing options. In most cases the entire phrase is preposed, even when it is a long
coordinated chain: 6
(63) Gen 47:1
אבי ואחי וצאנם ובקרם וכל אשר להם באו מארץ כנען
My father and my brothers, and their flocks and herds and all that
is theirs, have come from the land of Canaan
An alternative is to prepose the first part of the compound phrase and postpose
the remainder to the end of the clause. 7 The preposed element may or may
not be resumed by a pronoun in the postposed phrase. The resumptive type is
shown in (64) and (65) and the nonresumptive type in (66) and (67). 8
(64) Gen 44:3
:והאנשים שלחו המה וחמריהם
And the men were sent away, they and their asses
9. See also Gen 19:4, where the posponed modifying prepositional phrase is followed
by an appositive phrase: ואנשי העיר אנשי סדם נסבו על הבית מנער ועד זקן כל העם מקצה
‘And the men of the city, the men of Sodom, surrounded the house, both young and old,
all the people to the last man’.
10. Clausal adverbs are also known as sentence adverbs. Blau (1977) discusses sentence
adverbials that are separated from the rest of the clause by a conjunction (see §5.5.2) but does
not discuss the sentence adverb (i.e., a one-word adverbial) specifically. The term clausal
adverb appears in Waltke and O’Connor (1990: §39.3.2–5) but is defined more broadly to
include negative and restrictive particles, which have very different syntactic characteristics
than the ones discussed here. According to Gross (1996:138–40), a variety of adverbs and
particles that function on the clause or text level, such as עתה, הנה, and לכן, stand at the
margin of the preverbal field, before preposed constituents (see §3.3.6). According to Gross,
)ו(הנהis a “Satzdeiktikon,” )ו(עתהis a “Textdeiktikon,” and לכןis a conjunctional adverb
(1996: 129–31). Van der Merwe et al. (2002: §41.3) classify as modal adverbs some words
I consider clausal adverbs, such as ‘ אךsurely’. Others, such as הנה, are classified there as
“discourse markers” that “comment on the content of a sentence and/or sentences from a
meta-level” (§44). On discourse markers, see n. 13 below.
11. Quirk et al. (1985: 615). English clausal adverbs can also occur anywhere within the
clause, set off by commas. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1350–62) view clausal adverbs
as belonging to the supplement category, a category that also includes appositional phrases
and interpolations.
12. Disjuncts and conjuncts may be phrases as well as single-word adverbs. An example
of a disjunct phrase in BH is ‘ ולישמעאל שמעתיךAs for Ishmael, I have heard you’ (Gen
17:20). The disjunct and conjunct classes are distinct from the adjunct class (Quirk et al.
1985).
13. Quirk et al. (1985: 627–28, 642). Conjunct adverbs belong to a larger pragmatic
category known as discourse markers or discourse connectives. Discourse connectives are
linguistic elements that mark relations between clauses and may be adverbs, coordinating or
subordinating conjunctions, interjections, and perhaps even clauses. A tutorial overview of
the literature on discourse markers, accompanied by an extensive bibliography, can be found
in Schourup (1999). For further discussion, see chap. 6.
14. Some BH adverbs with semantic scope over the clause have freer positioning within
the clause, for example, ‘ אפואtherefore’. It would seem that these belong to a different syn-
tactic class from the one described here.
clauses in the Genesis corpus. 15 Examples (69)–(73) are clausal adverbs of the
disjunct type.
(69) אולי
אולי יחסרון חמשים הצדיקם חמשה
Perhaps the fifty righteous lack five. (Gen 18:28)
(70) הנה16
הנה נתתי לכם את כל עשב זרע זרע אשר על פני כל הארץ
Behold, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon the face of all
the earth (Gen 1:29)
(71) אך17
אך טרף טרף
Surely he has been torn to pieces (Gen 44:28)
(74) אולם
ואולם אחיו הקטן יגדל ממנו
Nevertheless, his younger brother shall be greater than he (Gen 48:19)
clausal adverb may have developed from the use of לא+ הin negative rhetorical questions.
Syntactic evidence for the clausal adverb includes the occurrence of הלאin front of a pre-
posed element, as in ‘ הלוא נכריות נחשבנו לוSurely as foreigners he regards us’ (Gen 31:15;
appears as example (89) below). Nonidiomatic interrogative הלאis composed of two sepa-
rable particles (Richard Steiner, personal communication). As described in §§5.2.2 and 5.3.1
below, when a noun phrase or prepositional phrase precedes the verb, הoccurs in front of the
preposed phrase and לאimmediately precedes the verb; see, e.g., Gen 18:25; 2 Sam 19:22;
Job 11:2. Thus, if הלואin Gen 31:15 were a combination of the interrogative and the nega-
tive, one would expect the order to be הנכריות לא נחשבנו לו. Additional syntactic evidence
for the clausal adverb is the occurrence of הלאpreceding a conditional clause (e.g., Gen 4:7,
1 Sam 15:17) and preceding a left-dislocated element (e.g., Num 23:12, Judg 11:24). Clausal
adverbs occur in these structural positions (see below, p. 73 in this section, and §5.2.3), while
interrogative ה, as well as the negative particle, does not. Thus, the position of clausal adverb
הלאin ‘ הלוא אם תיטיב שאתSurely, if you do right, there is uplift’ (Gen 4:7) contrasts with the
position of interrogative הin ‘ אם יגע טמא נפש בכל אלה היטמאIf someone defiled by a corpse
touches any of these, will it be defiled?’ (Hag 2:13; see also Job 14:4). For further discus-
sion, see Moshavi (2007c, forthcoming). Brongers (1981) contains a useful discussion of the
asseverative use of הלא, although he does not distinguish it formally from the interrogative.
The word הלאcan serve as a disjunct or a conjunct and strongly resembles הנהin all of its
uses. In its occurrences in Genesis, it is typically a conjunct, marking the justification for an
adjacent utterance. Although the clausal adverb הלאis usually understood as an asseverative
(‘surely’), I argue in a forthcoming article (Moshavi forthcoming) that it is best seen as a
presentative, like הנה.
20. The clausal adverb עתה, as opposed to the temporal adverb ‘ עתהnow’, is preceded
by ;וsee Waltke and O’Connor (1990: §39.3.4f).
(82) גם24
לא מצאתיה וגם אנשי המקום אמרו לא היתה בזה קדשה
I have not found her; and furthermore, the people of the place said,
“There has been no prostitute here.” (Gen 38:22)
21. See also, e.g., Gen 19:2, Josh 5:14, 2 Sam 20:21. Both כיand ( כי אם79) are discussed
further in the context of the focused clause in §8.3.3. On asseverative כי, see §4.3.3 n. 10
(p. 54).
22. See also, e.g., Gen 35:10, Lev 21:14, Num 10:30, 1 Sam 8:19. A slightly different
usage is found in Gen 40:14, which is more similar in meaning to the clausal adverb ;רקsee
example (83).
23. The conjunct is not represented in the translation due to the lack of an appropriate
English equivalent. See also, e.g., Gen 31:42, Num 22:29, 1 Sam 14:30.
24. The conjunct גםdiffers semantically from the more common focus adverb ‘ גםalso’
in having scope over the whole clause. The function of the conjunct is to add one utterance to
another (‘furthermore’, ‘moreover’). See also, e.g., Exod 3:9, 6:2–5; 1 Sam 4:17. The word
(83) רק25
ואם לא תאבה האשה ללכת אחריך ונקית משבעתי זאת רק את בני לא תשב
שמה
And if the woman is not willing to follow you, then you will be free from
this oath of mine; but do not take my son back there (Gen 24:8)
Further evidence for the detachedness of clausal adverbs is their position rela-
tive to a preposed subject, complement, or ordinary adjunct. The clausal ad-
verb always precedes the preposed element. 27 The following examples include
nearly all the clausal adverbs listed above.
גםas a conjunct may precede the disjunct הנה, as in the nonverbal clauses in Gen 38:24 and
Exod 4:14. According to Labuschagne (1966), גםis at times a purely “emphatic” adverb,
lacking an additive meaning. Muraoka (1985: 146), however, feels that “the particle gam
almost always retains its additive force.” In his comprehensive study of the particle, van
der Merwe (1990: 198) comes to a similar conclusion, writing that “Gam almost always has
an additive, inclusive or at least a connective connotation.” On preposing with the focusing
adverb גם, see §5.4.1.
25. See also Gen 19:8, 1 Kgs 11:13. The conjunct רקdiffers semantically from the fo-
cus adverb ‘ רקonly’ in having scope over the whole clause. In addition, the conjunct has a
contrastive meaning (‘but, however’) rather than a restrictive one. On the conjunct use, see
Kogut (1996: 204). According to BDB and Muraoka (1985: 131), רקis an asseverative par-
ticle in several cases; e.g., Gen 20:11.
26. For examples of a clausal adverb preceding an element separated from its clause by
a conjunction, see examples (131) and (132). In the nonverbal clause, however, a dislocated
element sometimes precedes a clausal adverb, for example: ויתר דברי שלמה וכל אשר עשׂה
‘ וחכמתו הלוא הם כתבים על ספר דברי שלמהAnd the other events of Solomon’s reign, and all
his actions . . . surely they are recorded in the book of the Annals of Solomon’ (1 Kgs 11:41).
27. This result agrees with Gross’s (1996: 138–40) finding that certain adverbs stand at
the margin of the preverbal field, before preposed constituents (see n. 10, p. 68 above).
The fact that the clausal adverb always precedes the other preverbal item sup-
ports the conclusion that the clausal adverb is not preposed. If both items were
preposed, we would expect to find variation in the relative order of the two
constituents. Furthermore, although double preposing does occur in classical
BH prose, it is much rarer than single preposing (see §5.4.2). 31 Additional con-
firmation of the detached analysis is a case in Genesis of a clausal adverb fol-
lowed by double preposing:
31. My count in the Genesis corpus identified 21 occurrences (see table 1, p. 85 below).
Single preposing is far more common; as shown in table 1, there are 402 occurrences of
single preposing in the Genesis corpus.
In rare instances the preposed item intervenes between the negative particle
and the verb: 36
32. In clausal negation, the whole clause is treated as negative, whereas in subclausal
negation, a word or phrase is negated (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 789).
33. In some cases (none of which occur in Genesis), טרםis not an adverb but a preposi-
tion governing a finite clause, as in ‘ וישא העם את בצקו טרם יחמץAnd the people took their
dough before it was leavened’ (Exod 12:34). See Waltke and O’Connor (1990: §31.6.3c);
HALOT s.v. טרם.
34. See also, e.g., Gen 20:4 and 21:26.
35. See also, e.g., Josh 2:8 and 1 Sam 3:7.
36. Goldenberg (1971, 1977, 1998a) views this construction as an “imperfectly-transformed
cleft sentence.” The completely transformed cleft would have a relative particle, yielding
something like לא אתם אשר שלחתם אותי הנה. Goldenberg cites parallels to this construction
in Mishnaic Hebrew and various dialects of Aramaic. Given the marginality in BH of cleft
constructions and negative clefts (if the latter exist at all), it is doubtful whether the לא+
preposing structure is related to clefting.
37. An exception is the causal כיclause, which is normally at the end of the clause. A
preverbal causal כיclause would be marked; no clauses of this sort, however, are to be found
among the finite clauses in Genesis.
position in the clause that is intermediate between the preposed position and
the clausal-adverb position. Adjunct clauses are more detached from the clause
than preposed constituents. This can be seen from the fact that the adjunct
clause is regularly connected to the rest of the clause by a conjunction, some-
thing that does not ordinarily happen with preposed constituents: 38
As compared to the clausal adverb, the adjunct clause is more closely con-
nected to the clause. When a clause contains both a clausal adverb and a pre-
verbal adjunct clause, the clausal adverb precedes the adjunct clause: 39
(105) Gen 24:49
ועתה אם ישכם עשים חסד ואמת את אדני הגידו לי
And now, if you will deal loyally and truly with my master, tell me
(106) Judg 21:21
והנה אם יצאו בנות שילו לחול במחלות ויצאתם מן הכרמים
And behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the
dances, come out of the vineyards
38. A conjunction sometimes intervenes between an initial element, usually a time ad-
junct, and the verb; see §5.5.2 for further discussion. I consider this to be a separate construc-
tion from preposing.
39. A similar observation is made in Blau (1977: 9) with regard to the relative order
of sentence adverbial and conditional clause. See also, e.g., Exod 19:5, 32:32, 33:13; Num
22:34; Judg 9:16; 1 Sam 20:29.
Although it stands at the head of the clause, interrogative הis not preposed. 43
Unlike the interrogative pro-forms, interrogative הcan occur with a preposed
element. In these cases, interrogative הprecedes the preposed element: 44
43. Interrogative הrarely appears with a coordinating conjunction in the classical prose
corpus. An apparent exception, ‘ והלוא עמך שם צדוק ואביתר הכהניםAnd surely Zadok and
Abiathar the priests will be with you there’ (2 Sam 15:35), is not actually the interrogative
הלוא. The word הלואin this clause is the asseverative clausal adverb (see n. 19, pp. 70–71
above). This interpretation is followed by the NJPSV and NRSV, which take the sentence as
declarative and omit the adverb. (The RSV, however, which generally does not recognize the
clausal adverb הלא, translates the verse with a rhetorical interrogative, ‘is it not?’).
44. See also, e.g., Gen 3:11, 17:17; Num 11:22; Judg 14:15; 2 Sam 19:22. In Deut 4:32
and 34, הappears after או.
45. The normal postverbal position for time adjuncts in general is confirmed by a survey
of a group of representative time adjuncts in the classical BH prose corpus. All of the occur-
rences of the following words and phrases were checked: ‘ מחרtomorrow’; ‘ היוםtoday’; ביום
‘on the . . . day (of)’; ‘ בחדשin the . . . month (of)’; בשנת/‘ בשנהin the . . . year (of)’; all tem-
poral infinitive phrases involving the prepositions ב, כ, or אחרי. The incidence of preposing
of these expressions is 27% overall. This result indicates clearly that the normal position for
time adjuncts is postverbal, as it is for adjuncts in general. The time adverbs listed in (111)
are exceptional in normally preceding the verb.
46. A similar observation is made by Gross (1996: 105–6).
47. Temporal אחרis always clause-initial in the classical BH prose corpus
48. The phrase אחרי כןis almost always clause-initial, except in ויהיclauses, which al-
ways begin with the verb (see §5.1), and in Josh 10:26, 1 Sam 24:8, and 2 Sam 21:14.
49. The word אזis always clause-initial in verbal clauses in the classical prose corpus. In
the nonverbal clause, it occurs between the subject and predicate, as in Gen 12:6 and 13:7.
עתה ‘now’ 50
כה ‘thus’ 51
Just like interrogative pro-forms, the adverbs in (111) do not occur in clauses
with an additional preverbal constituent. The natural conclusion is that the ad-
verbs stand in the preposed position and are not detached like clausal adverbs. 52
50. The word ( עתהwithout ו, as a time adjunct rather than a clausal adverb) is preverbal
in the vast majority of cases. The exceptions are Num 22:38; Judg 8:2, 8:6, 9:38, 11:7; 1 Sam
9:12, 17:29; 1 Kgs 12:4, 21:7.
51. The demonstrative adverb ‘ כהthus’ is almost always preverbal in the classical BH
prose corpus, with the exceptions of Exod 5:15 and Num 22:30.
52. In Deut 7:5, כהstands after an initial clausal adverb.
53. The focusing uses of גםand רקare distinct from their uses as conjuncts, as noted
above in §5.2.1 (pp. 72–73).
54. For a comprehensive study of constructions with גם, see van der Merwe (1990).
55. In a rare type that does not occur in Genesis, גםprecedes a cataphoric pronoun that
refers to a following appositive lexical expression, for example, ויעשו גם הם חרטמי מצרים
‘ בלהטיהם כןAnd they also, the Egyptian magicians, did the same with their spells’ (Exod
7:11).
The structure exemplified in (113) may be preposed in one of two ways. First,
both the lexical expression and the following גםphrase may be preposed to-
gether. An alternative is to prepose the lexical expression, with the גםphrase
remaining in its original position. The two options are illustrated by the close-
to-minimal pair in (115) and (116). 56
5.5.1. Left-dislocation
Left-dislocation, traditionally known by Hebraists as casus pendens, bears a
close resemblance to preposing but has an entirely different syntactic structure.
In both constructions, a constituent stands before the verb. In left-dislocation,
56. Representative occurrences of the first pattern from the Genesis corpus include Gen
4:22 and 19:38. A representative example of the second pattern is Gen 4:4.
57. A discussion of the functions of this construction can be found in Disse (1998:
1:190–99). Gross’s (2001a) monograph is devoted to the syntactic and pragmatic analysis of
double preposing in BH poetry and prose.
Number Percentage
65
1. Nonpreposed 2,901 84.0
2. Marked preposing 402 11.6
66
3. Unmarked preposing 71 2.1
4. Double preposing 21 0.6
5. Preposing with focus adverb 26 0.8
67
6. Other marked constructions 33 1.0
Total 3,454
70. Buth (1999: 88) contends that in double fronting the first element is a topic and the
second a focus (see §3.3.5 for further discussion). Double preposing in Modern Hebrew
is discussed in Ziv (1996a: 179), who states that the principle governing sentences of this
sort is that “the initial fronted constituent must be anchored in the discourse, if any fronted
entity is.”
71. The chi-square test is used to determine whether the difference between two popula-
tion proportions is statistically significant. The chi-square value is associated with a prob-
ability, p. According to standard statistical methodology, p must be less than .05 to be con-
sidered significant; in this case, p is less than or equal to .001.
is clear that preposing is still the marked order in this register, since the major-
ity of direct-speech clauses (78.3%) are not preposed.
Table 4 (p. 88) categorizes preposed clauses according to the syntactic
class of the preposed element. Almost all preposed elements are noun phrases
(64.9%) or prepositional phrases (32.8%). 72
Table 5 (p. 88) shows that preposed clauses are about evenly divided be-
tween subject preposing and complement/adverbial preposing.
5.7. Conclusion
The preposed constituent must be carefully distinguished from other ele-
ments that precede the verb. Clausal adverbs and most types of adjunct clauses
are unmarked and non-preposed in the preverbal position. There are two types
of preposing: the optional, marked type and the syntactically obligatory and
hence unmarked type (e.g., the preposing of interrogative pro-forms and cer-
tain time adverbs).
73. These are 18:5 ()כן, 25:10 ()שמה, and 31:42 ()ריקם.
74. These are Gen 6:9 ( )תמיםand 27:33 ()ברוך.
75. These are Gen 34:11, 41:28, and 41:55.
76. The preposed element in Gen 47:9 is a compound phrase consisting of a coordinated
noun and adjective, ‘ מעט ורעיםfew and bad’ (see HALOT s.v. )מעט.
77. The ambiguous cases are Gen 36:13, 14. Both clauses contain the copular verb היה,
a demonstrative pronoun and a definite noun phrase. Because both the demonstrative and
the noun phrase are definite, it is unclear which is the subject and which the predicate. Ac-
cording to Dyk and Talstra’s (1999) rules for determining subject and predicate in nominal
clauses, however, there is a definitive answer in these cases: in a nominal clause containing a
demonstrative pronoun and a definite noun phrase, the demonstrative pronoun is the subject;
see also Lowery (1999).
left-dislocated constituent, and the element separated from the clause by a con-
junction. There are insufficient data to distinguish between the degrees of de-
tachedness of these three types. Next is the preposed element, whether marked
or unmarked. Most integrated is the negative particle, which comes after a
preposed constituent and is nearly always immediately adjacent to the verb.
Of all of the marked word-order constructions, preposing is by far the most
common. In the following chapters, I examine the pragmatic functions of
preposing.
6.1. Focusing
As noted in §3.3.1.3, there appear to be four distinct conceptions of focus:
informational focus, contrastive focus, psychological focus, and attentional fo-
cus. Psychological focus is very similar to the concept of topic, as mentioned
in §3.3.1.3. The shortcomings of the contrastive and attentional focus concepts
have already been discussed: contrastive focus blurs the distinction between
topic and focus, and attentional focus is essentially a modernized version of
emphasis. 1 Informational focus, therefore, appears to be the most useful con-
ception of focus for explaining preposing. Informational focus is the part of the
proposition expressed by the sentence that is assumed by the speaker/writer to
be new, rather than given. The ensuing sections examine the nature of informa-
tional focusing in more detail.
90
argued that the concepts of predicate focus and sentence focus relate to given
information of an entirely different type from constituent focus, and that the
concept of informational focus, strictly speaking, applies only to the constitu-
ent type.
As discussed in §3.3.1.3, informational focus identifies an unknown ele-
ment in the given proposition, answering an implicit wh-question. An example
of constituent focus is the sentence Bill ate the doughnuts, with the primary
accent on Bill. This sentence expresses a semantic proposition, represented
informally as “Bill ate the doughnuts.” The accenting of Bill indicates that
the proposition “x ate the doughnuts” is given information in the context of
the utterance 2 and reflects an assumption that Who ate the doughnuts? is a
contextually appropriate question. The given proposition is directly related to
the semantic content of the sentence and is derived by replacing the focus Bill
with a variable.
Given this understanding of informational focus, one would expect predi-
cate and sentence focus to reflect given propositions in which the variable x
represents the predicate and the entire sentence, respectively. Thus, Lambrecht
(1994: 223) writes that a predicate-focus sentence such as My car broke down
could be used appropriately following the question What happened to your
car?, reflecting the given proposition “My car x ”; the sentence-focus sentence
such as My car broke down is said to be appropriately used following a ques-
tion such as What happened? Sentence-focus, then, apparently reflects the
given proposition “x happened.”
As Lambrecht’s further discussion makes clear, however, this description
of predicate and sentence focus is imprecise. Predicate-focus sentences can
also be uttered in the absence of a given proposition in which x represents the
predicate. According to Lambrecht, the only proposition that can be assumed
to be given with respect to a predicate-focus sentence such as My car broke
down is a proposition to the effect that “the speaker’s car is pragmatically
available as a topic for discussion”; in other words, the given information is the
proposition “the speaker’s car is a topic for this utterance” (Lambrecht 1994:
226). This proposition is not directly related to the content of the sentence, as
in constituent-focus sentences; furthermore, the focus broke down does not
2. Propositions of the form “x ate the doughnuts” are open propositions, that is, proposi-
tions containing a variable (Prince 1985, 1986). Dryer (1996: 512) points out that, techni-
cally speaking, open propositions cannot be given, in the sense of believed or known, “since
they are not the type of thing that can be true or false” (see §6.1.2 on various conceptions
of givenness). It would be more correct to say that the given proposition is the “existential
closure of an open proposition” (Dryer 1996: 512); i.e., “there exists an x such that x ate the
doughnuts.” In the present study, given propositions are represented as open propositions,
with the understanding that the open proposition is shorthand for the existential closure of
that proposition.
3. In Lambrecht and Michaelis (1998), the two types of given information are clearly
distinguished. Given information involving an open proposition is termed a “knowledge
presupposition,” and given information relating to sentence topic is termed a “topicality
presupposition.”
4. Although presupposition and activation are often discussed in relation to discourse
entities represented by noun phrases, the concepts are equally applicable to the propositions
represented by sentences (Dryer 1996: 483).
As Dryer notes, A’s question activates the proposition “x saw Mary” but does
not presuppose it, because the point of the question is precisely whether this
proposition is true. In this context, John can be marked as a focus by accenting,
as in (133), but cannot be marked as focus by a cleft construction, as shown by
the inappropriateness of (134). 10
6.1.3. Activation in a model of text comprehension
What kind of information do speakers/writers assume to be activated for
their addressees, and how does this information become activated, that is,
placed in short-term memory? I first consider written-speech contexts. It is
proposed here that activated information for the reader of a text is information
either contained in or inferrable from the previous sentence. Support for this
claim can be gathered from current research on the process of text compre-
hension. A broad body of psycholinguistic research supports the theory that
readers understand texts by constructing a coherent mental representation of
the text (Singer 1990; Sanders and Spooren 2001). Short-term and long-term
memory play key roles in building the mental representation. In the ensuing
discussion, activation is examined in the light of a well-known comprehen-
sion model, Kintsch’s “construction-integration” model (1998). The model is
supported by a large number of laboratory experiments by Kintsch and others.
9. Prince (1986: 210) has stated that Yiddish-movement (see §3.3.1.2, p. 33 n. 47) dif-
fers from the aforementioned constructions in involving presupposed but not necessarily
activated information (see also Prince 1988: 512–15). In later work (1992, 1999), however,
she states that the given information in Yiddish-movement may be merely plausibly infer-
able and not necessarily presupposed.
10. Similarly, B may answer Nobody saw her, but not It was nobody who saw her.
The first sentence, in which the focus is marked by accent alone, is acceptable because it
marks the proposition “Somebody saw him” as activated. The cleft sentence is unacceptable
because it presupposes the proposition “Somebody saw him,” while its content contradicts
this presupposition. For additional proofs that focusing by accent does not involve presup-
position, see Dryer (1996).
The relevant aspect of Kintsch’s theory for present purposes is the concept
of working memory, which includes short-term memory as well as a section of
long-term memory. Long-term memory, storing knowledge, beliefs, and ex-
perience, is a network of propositions, a large and intricately interconnected
structure. Short-term working memory, in contrast, is an extremely small buf-
fer containing up to four or perhaps seven “chunks” of information—about
the amount of information contained in a single sentence (Kintsch 1998: 217,
411). Strictly speaking, the only information that is activated is the proposition
currently in short-term working memory. This is not the only memory avail-
able to the reader, however. The reader also has near-instant access to all of the
propositions in long-term memory that are directly linked to the proposition
in the short-term memory. These easily retrievable propositions constitute the
long-term working memory. Propositions in long-term working memory can be
easily activated and placed in short-term memory and are known as accessible
propositions. 11
The essence of the comprehension process is described by Kintsch (1998:
93) as follows: “We comprehend a text, understand something, by building a
mental model. To do so we must form connections between things that were
previously disparate: the ideas expressed in the text and relevant prior knowl-
edge.” A reader builds a mental representation of the text in the form of a
network of propositions derived from the text and stores it in long-term mem-
ory. As the reader proceeds through a text, a proposition is constructed corre-
sponding to each sentence and stored in short-term working memory. After the
sentence processing is completed, the proposition representing the sentence is
copied to long-term memory and linked to the textual representation already
stored there. Furthermore, additional propositions, drawn from the reader’s
knowledge and experience, are added to the representation and linked to the
sentence representation. These propositions include, for example, bridging in-
ferences regarding referring expressions in the text, inferences about causal
connections between sentences in the text, and elaborative inferences that fill
in details unspecified in the text (Kintsch 1998: 188–99). 12
11. This term is from Dryer (1996: 481), although Dryer does not connect accessibility
to long-term working memory. According to Dryer, accessible information is inferable from
activated information and is therefore more easily activated than unrelated information. Ac-
cessible information is similar but not identical to Chafe’s (1987; 1994: 29) “semi-active”
information. Accessibility also has a different meaning in Ariel’s Accessibility Theory (for a
recent summary and discussion, see Ariel 2001). For Ariel, accessibility is a scalar property
applicable to activated and nonactivated entities and refers to the ease of retrieval of an item
from memory.
12. Higher-level propositions are also inserted into the text representation to represent
the macrostructure of the text, that is, its main ideas and themes. On the various types of
inferences made during text comprehension, see Singer (1990: 167–89); Kintsch (1998:
193–98); Graesser et al. (2001). A controversy exists over which types of inferences are
As the reader moves on to the next sentence, the central information con-
tained in the previous sentence is retained in short-term memory in order to aid
in comprehending the next sentence. All of the propositions in the text repre-
sentation directly linked to the information in short-term memory, including
inferred information, are in long-term working memory and can be quickly and
easily converted to activated information. In short, when reading a sentence,
the gist of the previous sentence is activated and information inferred from or
directly linked to the previous sentence is accessible.
In Kintsch’s model, activated and accessible propositions have much in
common, both being part of working memory. Moreover, it is hard to draw
a line between activated and accessible information, because information in
long-term working memory can quickly and easily be activated and transferred
to short-term memory. It is plausible, therefore, that both activated and acces-
sible propositions can serve as given information in connection with a focusing
construction. In fact, it can be argued that a focusing construction relating to
an accessible proposition reflects an assumption that this proposition will have
been activated by the reader. From this point, on I will use activated to refer
to information in short-term memory as well as accessible information that is
treated by the writer as activated.
The comprehension model as outlined above relates to text comprehension
and does not include many aspects of spoken-language comprehension. In spo-
ken discourse, information assumed to be in the consciousness of the addressee
is not restricted to propositions derived from the preceding discourse but also
includes propositions pertaining to the identities of speaker and addressee,
their emotions and motivations, as well as elements of the real-world environ-
ment in which the dialogue takes place. All of this information cannot possibly
fit into the small short-term memory buffer. Kintsch (1998: 411) suggests that
this additional information should be thought of as located in permanently acti-
vated nodes in long-term memory. Focusing constructions in spoken discourse,
then, may relate to activated parts of the addressee’s mental representation of
the preceding utterances, as well as additional information of the permanently
activated type.
typically generated during text comprehension and which only later during retrieval. Readers
appear to vary greatly in the degree of inference that they perform during the comprehension
process.
13. See, e.g., Gen 15:4, 44:17; Deut 1:36, 38, 39; 1 Kgs 22:14; 2 Kgs 17:36.
6.2. Topicalization
As described in §3.3.1.2, the term topicalization at first denoted a syntactic
concept, later shifting to a syntactic-prosodic one; yet another use of the term
is to denote a syntactic-pragmatic concept. The latter conception of topicaliza-
tion is the most useful for investigating BH, a language for which we have no
prosodic data. 14 It is important to keep in mind, of course, that correspond-
ing structures in different languages may not have exactly the same pragmatic
properties. Thus, the function of BH topicalization may be subtly different
from topicalization in other languages. In order to determine whether topical-
ization exists in BH, however, we need to understand exactly what the function
of topicalization is.
As discussed in §3.3.1.2, the linguistic literature cited in studies of BH is
somewhat unclear on this crucial point, with topicalization variously charac-
terized as marking discontinuity, continuity, or both. There are, however, other
studies of topicalization that have not been fully taken advantage of by schol-
ars of BH. These are addressed in §6.2.1. In §6.2.2, I present a new character-
ization of BH topicalization based on prior research on topicalization and on
discourse connectives.
14. On the cross-linguistic investigation of topicalization, see, e.g., Myhill (1985, 1992b)
and Givón (2001).
15. See Prince (e.g., 1985, 1986, 1988, 1998); Ward and Prince (1991); Birner and Ward
(1998).
16. Levinsohn (1990: 22) cites this definition, attributing it erroneously to Andrews
(1985: 78). Levinsohn’s understanding of topicalization is much broader than Prince’s, in-
cluding the use of preposing to mark all kinds of discontinuities, whether relating to the
preposed constituent or to the thematic progression of the story.
17. The logical definition of this concept is highly technical and difficult to understand
intuitively; according to Ward and Prince (1991:173), partially ordered sets “are defined by
a partial ordering R on some set of referents, b, such that, for all b1, b2, and b3 that are ele-
ments of b, R is either reflexive, transitive, and antisymmetric… or, alternatively, irreflexive,
transitive, and asymmetric.” The linguistic application of the partially ordered set originates
in Hirschberg (1991).
18. See Ward and Prince (1991: 175–76); Prince (1998: 8).
19. See also Prince (1998).
Example (135) contains paired topicalized clauses, with sleep and Mom as the
respective preposed constituents. Mom is obviously meant to be related to the
preceding sleep, despite the lack of any natural relation between the two con-
cepts outside the given context. Birner and Ward (1998: 234) explain that these
two items belong to an ad-hoc partially ordered set, {things children need}.
This example and others like it raise the question whether the elaborate logical
apparatus of the poset is really necessary for the description of topicalization.
The possibility of ad-hoc posets means, in essence, that any items that con-
stitute a pair in a given context qualify as a poset. 21 It can be argued that this
loose conception of the relation between the linked items obviates the need for
partially ordered set concept. The point is that the linked items in topicalization
are contextually related in a way that is recognizable by the addressee.
6.2.1.2. Marking a focus in relation to a given proposition
Prince, as well as Birner and Ward, argue that in addition to marking a
relation pertaining to the preposed constituent, topicalization simultaneously
marks a different constituent as focus. The focus in a topicalized clause re-
mains in its original position and is marked by accent alone. Thus in Prince’s
view, a sentence of the form Cake I like to eat with a spoon would only be
appropriate in a context in which “I like to eat cake with an x ” is an activated
20. Birner and Ward (1998) have extended and modified Prince’s theory of topicaliza-
tion to explain a wide variety of marked word-order constructions in English and other lan-
guages; my comments on their work are restricted to its ramifications for preposing.
21. I am indebted to Yael Ziv for this insight (personal communication).
proposition, and “spoon” is the new value for x. 22 Birner and Ward (1998)
agree with Prince that most types of topicalization, except for those involving
preposed locatives, mark a focus.
Gregory and Michaelis (2001: 1673 n. 8), raise doubts regarding the focus-
marking function of topicalization. They note that the final accent in Cake, I
like to eat with a spoon need not represent constituent focus but can just as
well be interpreted as the unmarked articulation, in which the accent falls on
the last lexical expression in the clause. 23 Thus, “I like to eat cake with an x ” is
not necessarily given information with respect to the clause. 24
An examination of some of the examples of topicalization cited by Birner
and Ward (1998) confirms that topicalization need not involve constituent fo-
cus. In examples (136) and (137), it is unlikely that the (presumably) accented
constituent is interpretable as the focus.
22. In Prince (1985), the given proposition is arrived at by replacing the accented constit-
uent with a variable and by replacing the preposed constituent with the set containing it, that
is, “I like to eat {types of foods} with an x.” In Prince (1998: 293) the procedure is described
somewhat differently: the preposed constituent is not replaced by the set containing it but
is accompanied by an explicit representation of the set relation; that is, “I like to eat cake, a
member of the set {types of food}, with an x.” It is unclear to me how the latter formulation
differs in its propositional content from the simpler version, “I like to eat cake with an x.”
23. This is what Lambrecht calls the “predicate-focus” articulation, in which the focus is
projected from the accented constituent over the entire verb phrase (see §3.3.7).
24. It can be further noted that, under the predicate-focus interpretation, “I do x ” cannot
be assumed to be given information either; see §6.1.1.
The ad-hoc contextual relation between sleep and Mom is hardly significant
in and of itself. Rather, this relation serves to indicate a larger-scale relation
between the clauses—in this case, contrast. In most cases of BH topicalization,
a specific relation, usually contrast or similarity, exists between the topicalized
clause and the clause containing the other linked entity. When the two linked
items are identical, the relation between clauses is often one of explanation or
restatement. Occasionally, the relation is one of temporal sequence.
In marking relations between clauses, BH topicalization bears a functional
resemblance to discourse connectives, which are words or phrases that mark
the relation between two adjacent sentences or text segments (Schiffrin 1987:
31; Fraser 1990, 1996; Schourup 1999). 25 Discourse connectives and the rela-
tions they signal have been studied by researchers in pragmatics as well as by
psycholinguists. Relations between text segments, including causal, contras-
tive, and concessive relations, are frequently referred to as coherence rela-
tions (Sanders 1997; Sanders and Noordman 2000; Knott 2001; Sanders and
Spooren 2001). Coherence relations are often left to the reader to infer and not
explicitly signaled on the formal level. Alternatively, coherence relations may
be signaled by discourse connectives such as so, but, however, and similarly.
In the context of psycholinguistic theories of comprehension, discourse con-
nectives are said to facilitate the building of a coherent text representation by
guiding the reader in correctly linking the representations of the two segments
(Sanders and Noordman 2000; Sanders and Spooren 2001).
Coherence relations are generally divided into two types: those that con-
cern the content of the two segments, and those that concern the speaker’s
reasoning or the speech acts accomplished by the segments. These types are
sometimes known as semantic and pragmatic relations, respectively (Van Dijk
1979: 449); 26 alternative terms are external and internal relations (Halliday
and Hasan 1976: 240), and ideational and rhetorical relations (Redeker 1990).
Sweetser (1990: 21) divides the pragmatic relation category into epistemic (re-
lating to the speaker’s beliefs or reasoning) and speech act relations. Following
Sweetser, I will refer to three types of coherence relations: content, epistemic,
and speech-act relations. 27
The difference between the various types of relations is illustrated in (139).
As the examples show, a single discourse connective can often signal more
than one type of relation.
25. Many discourse connectives are conjunct adverbs or adverbials (see §5.2.1).
26. Van Dijk’s use of the term pragmatic is narrower than the one adopted in the present
work. I am using this term to include all aspects of the relations between clauses and their
contexts, including the so-called semantic relations.
27. The question of whether epistemic and speech-act relations should be subsumed un-
der a single category does not concern us here; for an attempt to settle this issue, see Knott
(2001). On the relations signaled by discourse connectives in Modern Hebrew, see Abadi
(1988).
28. Blakemore (1987: 86) notes that discourse connectives do not always link segments
in a single discourse, but may relate to a different speaker’s utterance, as in (1), or even to
the extratextual situation, as in (2):
(1) A: You take the first turning on the left.
B: So I don’t go past the hospital. (Blakemore 1987: 85)
(2) [Having seen someone arrive home laden with parcels]
A: So you’ve spent all your money. (Blakemore 1987: 86)
Some of the examples of topicalization cited by Birner and Ward (1998) are similar to (1),
linking the preposed item to an item in a different speaker’s utterance, as in (3).
(3) A: You know this album?
B: This song I know. (Birner and Ward 1998: 44)
This type of topicalization does not appear to occur in the Genesis corpus, but occurs in
Jer 1:14, where the preposed ‘ מצפוןfrom the north’ in God’s utterance is linked to ‘ צפונהthe
north’ in Jeremiah’s immediately preceding utterance.
In this chapter, the pragmatic function of preposing in the 401 marked pre-
posed clauses in Genesis (see §3.6) is analyzed, with the aim of establish-
ing the dominance of the information-structure concepts of focusing and
topicalization.
104
Number Percentage
Focusing 50 12.4
Topicalization 171 42.5
4
Focusing/topicalization 7 1.7
Residue 174 43.3
Total 402
Information
Syntactic function structure Other Total
Subject No. 86 110 196
% 43.9 56.1
Complement/adjunct No. 140 64 204
% 68.6 31.4
Total No. 226 174 400
% 56.5 43.5
chi-square = 24.914
p ¯ .001
Information
Register structure Other Total
Narrative No. 108 54 162
% 66.7 33.3
Direct speech No. 120 120 240
% 50.0 50.0
Total No. 228 174 402
% 56.7 43.3
chi-square = 10.944
p ¯ .001
involving the prepositions כ, ב, or אחרי. Of the 123 clauses containing pre-
posed expressions of these types, a total of 72% have an information-structure
function. When this figure is compared to the 68% of complement/adjunct-
preposed clauses that have an information-structure function, it can be seen
that information-structure functions are at least as dominant in time-adjunct-
preposed clauses as in complement/adjunct-preposed clauses in general. These
results indicate that there is no reason to consider time-adjunct preposing to be
functionally distinct from complement/adjunct preposing in general.
Table 9 shows the distribution of pragmatic functions in complement/ad-
junct preposed clauses. The table shows that topicalization is over twice as
common as focusing in complement/adjunct preposed clauses, 45.6%, as com-
pared to 20.5%.
Focus./
Register Focus. Topic. Topic. Residue Total
Narrative No. 7 47 4 7 65
% 10.8 72.3 6.2 10.8
Direct speech No. 35 46 1 57 139
% 25.2 33.1 0.7 41.0
Total No. 42 93 5 64 204
% 20.6 45.6 2.5 31.4
4. The chi-square text was not performed on this table. The chi-square test is not consid-
ered accurate for this table due to the presence of two cells with frequencies of less than 5.
to this focus is activated or accessible for the addressee. This procedure may
not identify all of the cases in which the speaker/writer is treating a particular
proposition as activated. The preposed clauses in (140) and (141), for example,
may have been intended to be focused, although they are not classified as such
due to lack of evidence of an activated proposition.
5. The translation follows NJPSV in giving הלאan asseverative rather than an interrogative
interpretation (see §5.2.1, p. 70 n. 19 for the distinction between the two). In this clause, הלא
marks the justification for the preceding rhetorical question, as explained further in §7.3.2.1.
6. Chafe (1976: 34) calls this a “quasi-given” state, where the speaker engages in a pre-
tense that conscious information is involved. On accommodation, see Lewis (1979); Dryer
(1996).
7. Similar instances are Gen 15:18–21, 24:7, and 31:15. See also Gen 21:6, where the
speaker is addressing a nonspecific audience or herself.
In this verse God speaks as if “I shall give this land to x ” is an activated propo-
sition, although there is no reason to assume that Abram was thinking about
this proposition.
8. These are Isa 45:23; Jer 22:5, 49:13. The similar expression נשבעתי′‘ ביby the LORD
I swear’ occurs in 2 Sam 19:8.
9. Additional examples include 1 Sam 18:24 and 2 Sam 17:6. In 2 Sam 14:3, the equiv-
alent expression is not preposed.
10. Additional examples include Exod 24:3, 7; Josh 1:16. A similar formula has a left-
dislocated structure instead of a preposed clause (Num 22:20, 23:26). Folmer (1995: 569–72)
shows that in Aramaic texts of the Achaemenid period, phrases containing general relative
clauses of the form זי. . . ‘ כלevery x that’ are usually preposed; this is also true of similar
types such as ‘ מה זיwhatever’ and ‘ מן זיwhoever’. (I am indebted to Richard Steiner for the
A similar formula occurs in (149)–(151), with the head of the relative clause
omitted.
these cases, it is necessary to decide whether the preposing is for the purpose
of linking the identical entities and the clauses containing them or whether the
purpose is to mark a different function such as anteriority or simultaneity.
Table 11 shows the distribution of information-structure functions in
subject-preposed clauses. Cases clearly intended to have a function relating to
the clause as a whole are counted as residue even if the sentence could tech-
nically be taken as topicalization. If the data in table 11 are compared to the
comparable data for complement/adjunct-preposed clauses in table 9 (p. 106),
it can be seen that focusing is much less common in subject-preposed clauses.
Only 4.6% of subject-preposed clauses are focused, as compared to 20.5%
of complement/adjunct-preposed clauses. The frequency of topicalization in
both groups is more similar: 38.3% of subject-preposed clauses and 45.6% of
complement/adjunct-preposed clauses are topicalized. Turning to the residue,
it can be seen that the residue of subject-preposed clauses is much larger than
the residue of complement/adjunct clauses, at 56.1% as compared to 31.4%.
In table 12 (p. 112), the frequencies of information-structure functions
in subject-preposed clauses are tabulated separately for narrative and direct
speech. Although some differences may be noted between the two registers,
the differences are probably not statistically significant. 12 Topicalization is
much more common than focusing in both registers, although the frequency is
somewhat higher in narrative, constituting 47.4% of the total, as compared to
only 30.7% in direct speech. In both registers, focusing is a rare phenomenon,
occurring in 3.2% of narrative clauses and 5.0% of direct-speech clauses. In-
terestingly, the residue of subject preposing constitutes nearly 50% or more of
the clauses in both registers. This contrasts with the residue of complement/
adjunct preposing in narrative, which is quite small (see table 10, p. 107). Al-
though the sizes of the residues in narrative and direct speech are comparable,
12. The chi-square test cannot be performed on this table because one of the cells has a
frequency of 0.
Focus./
Register Focus. Topic. Topic. Residue Total
Narrative No. 3 45 0 47 95
% 3.2 47.4 0 49.5
Direct Speech No. 5 31 2 63 101
% 5.0 30.7 2.0 62.4
Total No. 8 76 2 110 196
% 4.1 38.8 1.0 56.1
the functional distribution of the residue clauses differs considerably in the two
registers, as I discuss next.
13. Additional examples from the Genesis corpus include Gen 20:4 and 31:19. Addi-
tional representative examples from the classical BH prose corpus include Josh 2:6; 1 Sam
9:15, 30:1.
7.3.1.2. Simultaneity
Preposing can be used to mark a simultaneous event. In several instances,
the preposed clause is simultaneous with an immediately preceding nonverbal
or participial clause: 14
14. Appears in chap. 3 as (7) (p. 23). Additional examples from the Genesis corpus in-
clude 29:9, 38:25, and 44:3. Additional representative examples from the classical BH prose
corpus include Judg 18:3; 1 Sam 9:11; 1 Kgs 20:39.
15. As discussed in §3.1.2, it seems likely that simultaneity and near-simultaneity con-
stitute a single pragmatic category. Pairs of finite preposed simultaneous clauses occur, for
example, in Josh 2:8, Judg 18:22, 1 Sam 9:5, and 2 Sam 2:24.
16. The other example is Gen 22:1. In a different pattern, the ויהיclause is a bare verbal
form without a temporal adverbial, followed by two preposed simultaneous clauses (Gen
15:17 and 27:30, )ויהי אך. See §4.4.2 for the syntactic analysis of ויהיclauses adopted in the
present work.
17. An additional example is Gen 37:3.
Both (159) and (160) occur at the beginning of a ‘ פרשה סתומהclosed portion’
(see §3.1.3). 18
Somewhat more frequently, subject-preposing marks the clause as begin-
ning a new scene within a narrative unit. The new scene is characterized by
new participants and/or a new setting: 19
18. Additional examples include Gen 3:1, 4:1, and 21:1. The latter two clauses are at the
beginning of a פרשה סתומה.
19. Additional examples include Gen 13:14, 18:17, 34:5 ()ויעקב, and 37:36.
20. See also Gen 26:27 and 32:12. Examples found in the classical BH prose corpus
include Judg 21:7; 1 Sam 15:6, 16:1, 28:16.
In (164), the rhetorical question ‘ למה תעמד בחוץWhy do you stand outside?’
implies the assertion “There is no reason for you to stand outside.” The subse-
quent preposed clause, ‘ ואנכי פניתי הביתI have prepared the house’, supplies a
justification for this implication. In (165), the question ‘ האף אמנם אלדShall I
indeed bear a child?’ implies “I will not bear a child.” The preposed clause, ואני
‘ זקנתיI am old’, supports this prediction. The relation between the rhetorical
question and preposed clause in (166) is comparable.
Preposing for justification is an alternative to marking with the clausal ad-
verb ( הלאsee §5.2.1). As in the case of preposing, utterances justified by הלא
are usually directives or rhetorical questions (Moshavi 2007b): 21
21. See also, e.g., Gen 19:20, 44:5; Judg 6:14, 11:7 (appears as example 170); 1 Sam
17:29; 2 Sam 11:20; 2 Kgs 6:32. The interpretation of justificational הלאas a clausal adverb
is supported by its interchangeability with הנה. Representative examples of הנהjustifying a
directive include Gen 16:2; 27:2–3, 6–8; 42:2; for הנהjustifying a rhetorical question, see,
e.g., Gen 25:32; 1 Sam 20:2, 28:9. Unlike הנה, which almost always precedes the justified
utterance, הלאmay precede or follow. When a justificational הלאclause contains a preposed
element, הלאoccurs in front of the preposed element, in the characteristic position of the
clausal adverb (e.g., Gen 20:5, 29:25, 31:15; Josh 22:20; Judg 4:14, 11:7; 1 Kgs 1:13). For
further discussion on distinguishing the clausal adverb from interrogative הלא, see Moshavi
(forthcoming).
The justification in (169) is the segment ;ואתם שנאתם אתי ותשלחוני מאתכם
in (170), it is the very similar הלא אתם שנאתם אותי ותרגשוני מבית אבי. The
supported rhetorical question in both cases is מדוע באתם אלי. In (170), the
justificational segment is marked by ( הלאand by preposing), whereas in (169)
it is marked by preposing alone. One difference between marking justification
by הלאas opposed to preposing is that הלאmay precede or follow the justified
utterance, 22 but the preposed clause always follows.
Example (169) illustrates that preposing may mark a justification that is a
segment longer than a clause. The justification in this example includes the
clause following the preposed one, ותרגשוני מבית אבי. In such cases, only the
first clause in the segment is preposed.
7.3.2.2. Affirmation
In several cases, a preposed first-person pronoun occurs in a promise to
carry out a certain action. 23 The exact pragmatic function of preposing in this
group is difficult to characterize; to say that the pronoun is “emphatic” is hardly
sufficient. Nevertheless, the pattern exemplified by these clauses is undoubt-
edly significant. It could be that this category and the category of boasting, de-
scribed in §7.3.2.3 (p. 119), are subtypes of a broader category the parameters
of which are currently unclear.
22. For הלאpreceding, see, e.g., Gen 37:13; Judg 15:2, 11; 1 Sam 9:21, 26:15.
23. See Waltke and O’Connor 1990: §16.3.2b. Additional examples are Gen 38:17 and
50:21. Additional clear examples from the classical BH prose corpus are Exod 8:24; Judg
6:18, 17:10; 1 Kgs 2:18, 21:7; 2 Kgs 6:3.
7.3.2.3. Boasting
Joüon-Muraoka (§146a) note that preposed first-person pronouns occur in
boasts, as in the well-known instances in the Mesha inscription. Genesis con-
tains one clause of this type:
7.4. Conclusion
Statistical analysis of the pragmatic functions of preposing in the Genesis
corpus reveals a complex picture in which information-structure functions play
the leading roles, accompanied by various other functions, not all of which
can be currently identified. Focusing and topicalization account for 56.6% of
all preposed clauses, with topicalization being over three times as common as
focusing. The actual numbers of focused clauses may be somewhat higher,
because some plausible cases were excluded due to lack of textual evidence of
activation. In comparison to information-structure functions, which constitute
the majority of preposed clauses, functions relating to the clause as a whole
(i.e., marking anteriority, simultaneity, background information, the start of a
new scene or episode, justification, affirmation, and boasting) together consti-
tute only 11.2% of preposed clauses over all. Preposing in fixed expressions
accounts for an additional 1.5%. The function of preposing in the remaining
30.6% of clauses is currently unclear; nearly all of these (83.7%) are in direct
speech.
Complement/adjunct preposing and subject-preposing exhibit distinct func-
tional patterns; these patterns also vary according to discourse register. Com-
plement/adjunct preposing in narrative is almost exclusively for the purpose
of focusing or topicalization. In direct speech, however, information-structure
functions constitute only three-fifths of the preposed-complement/adjunct
total. Much of the residue of complement/adjunct preposed clauses in direct
speech is hard to characterize, but in some of the cases preposing appears to
reflect a fixed expression and does not have a pragmatic function. Almost half
(175) Subject
:בלעדי אלהים יענה את שלום פרעה
Not I. God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer. (Gen 41:16)
(176) Complement
את צאנם ואת בקרם:בני יעקב באו על החללים ויבזו העיר אשר טמאו אחותם
:ואת חמריהם ואת אשר בעיר ואת אשר בשדה לקחו
And the sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and plundered the city, be-
cause they had defiled their sister. Their flocks and their herds and
their asses, and whatever was in the city and whatever was in the
field they took. (Gen 34:27–28)
(177) Adjunct
:כל רמש אשר הוא חי לכם יהיה לאכלה כירק עשב נתתי לכם את כל
Every moving thing that lives, for you shall be for food. Like the green
grasses, I give you everything. (Gen 9:3)
121
The preposed constituent is ‘ ברחובin the street’, but the focus is ‘ הרחובthe
street’. The focused clause relates to the proposition “We will spend the night
in x,” activated by Laban’s invitation, סורו נא אל בית עבדכם ולינו. The clause
asserts “x = the street.” The preposition בis necessarily preposed along with its
noun phrase, despite being extraneous to the focus.
In the focused clauses cited in this chapter, the preposed element is bolded
in its entirety, whether or not it is identical with the focus.
The first clause, ואך את דמכם לנפשתיכם אדרש, activates the proposition “I will
require your life-blood of x ”; the source argument is not present in the surface
structure of the clause. The focused clause supplies the value “every beast”
for x.
In (182), the activated proposition “He will father x ” is derived by entail-
ment from the preceding clauses. 1
(182) Gen 17:20
הנה ברכתי אתו והפריתי אתו והרביתי אתו במאד מאד שנים עשר נשיאם
יוליד
Behold, I bless him and I will make him fruitful and exceedingly numer-
ous. Twelve princes he will father
Abraham’s command to the servant not to take a wife for Isaac from the Ca-
naanites implies that he must go elsewhere to find a wife for Isaac; that is, “You
will go to x to take a wife for Isaac.” The focused clause identifies “my father’s
house” as the value for x.
In spoken discourse, activated information includes textually derived in-
formation in the mental representation of the preceding dialogue, as well as
extra-textual information pertaining to the speaker’s and addressee’s personal
details, their motivations, and their perceptions of the environment. Direct
speech in the Bible may be treated like spoken discourse for the purposes of
analyzing focusing. Although direct speech in the Bible is not an exact ren-
dition of spoken discourse, as discussed in §§1.2 and 4.4.3, it nevertheless
represents the quoted citation from the perspectives of the quoted speaker and
addressee. Focusing in direct speech relates to information activated for the
quoted addressee, rather than for the reader of the citation. Either textual or
extratextual sources of information, therefore, may be relevant in analyzing
direct-speech focusing.
An example of extra-textual activation is shown in (184):
Because Leah knows that Jacob is heading for Rachel’s tent, she takes the
proposition “Jacob will go to x ” as information activated by the extratextual
situation. Her statement, אלי תבוא, replaces “Rachel,” the value for x activated
for Jacob, with a new value, “Leah.” 2
When a person comes to see someone else, the proposition “I have come” is
treated as activated extratextual information. An adjunct describing the purpose
of the visit can be marked as a focus in relation to this activated proposition: 3
2. This clause is of the substitutional type, where the focus replaces a previously acti-
vated value for x (see §8.3.3).
3. An additional example of this type is 1 Sam 16:5.
And they said to Pharaoh, “Your servants are shepherds, as our fathers
also were.” And they said to Pharaoh, “To sojourn in the land we have
come.”
(186) Judg 15:11–12
וירדו שלשת אלפים איש מיהודה אל סעיף סלע עיטם ויאמרו לשמשון הלא
ידעת כי משלים בנו פלשתים ומה זאת עשית לנו ויאמר להם כאשר עשו לי כן
ויאמרו לו לאסרך ירדנו לתתך ביד פלשתים:עשיתי להם
And three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock
of Etam, and said to Samson, “Surely you know that the Philistines are
rulers over us. What have you done to us?” And he said to them, “As
they did to me, so have I done to them.” And they said to him, “To bind
you we have come down, so that we may give you into the hands of the
Philistines.”
the Hittites answered Abraham, saying to him, “Hear us, my lord; you
are a prince of God among us. In the choicest of our burial places bury
your dead.”
5. For other examples of focusing in commands or requests, see, e.g., Gen 20:15, 44:2,
43:12, and 47:6.
6. A different taxonomy is found in Dik (1989: 282), where six types are distin-
guished: completive, parallel, replacing, expanding, restricting, and selecting; see also Dik
et al. (1981). This taxonomy is followed in Rosenbaum (1997) and Heimerdinger (1999).
The focused clause echoes the rhetorical question posed just before by the
same speaker, ‘ מה עשית לנוWhat have you done to us?’ Although on the sur-
face this looks like identificational focus, an interpretation such as this misses
the implication of the rhetorical question. 10 In contrast to the genuine question,
an RQ is not a request for information but an implicit assertion (Ilie 1994: 38,
45; Schmidt-Radefeldt (1977: 376–77). The assertion implied by Abimelek’s
question is “You have done a terrible thing.” 11 Because the focus, “things that
ought not to be done,” is merely a reformulation of the value for x that has
already been activated (“a terrible thing”), this is actually descriptive focus
(see §8.3.2).
More commonly, identificational focusing answers a question that could ap-
propriately be asked by the hearer/reader, not one that has actually been asked: 12
In (191), the previous clause ‘ ויבזו העירthey plundered the city’ entails the
proposition “they took x.” This proposition can appropriately be the subject
of a question: “What did they take?” The focused clause supplies the answer:
. . . ‘ את צאנם ואת בקרםTheir flocks, their cattle’, and so on. Similarly, in (192),
the reader may ask subsequent to reading the first clause, “Of whom will God
require the blood?” The preposed clause indicates the answer: ‘ מכל חיהOf
every beast’. 15
When the focus in an identifying clause is an adjunct, the focus supplies
a previously unspecified detail regarding the circumstances of the event de-
scribed in an activated proposition. Consider (193) and (194): 16
12. See also, e.g., Gen 17:20 ( )שנים עשר נשיאיםand 35:11.
13. Appears as (176) above (p. 121).
14. Appears as (181) above (p. 124).
15. An additional value for x is supplied in the continuation of the verse; the latter clause
is an example of additive focus (see §8.3.4.)
16. See also, e.g., Gen 7:20, 9:3 ()כירק עשב, 20:5 ()בתם לבבי, and 41:11. In the latter
verse, the preposed element is an adjunct phrase containing the word איש: איש כפתרון חלמו
‘ חלמנוEach man according to the interpretation of his dream we dreamed.’ The word
אישcannot be the subject of the clause, as is evident from the mismatch in person and num-
ber between אישand the verb (additional examples are Gen 41:12 and 49:28).
17. The negation of the proposition “x = v ” does not remove this proposition from the
hearer’s consciousness, because the negated proposition remains in short-term memory; it
does, of course, strip it of presupposed status if it previously had this status.
18. Representative examples with כיfrom the classical BH prose corpus include 1 Sam
8:7 and 10:19. Representative examples with כי אםare Num 10:30 and 2 Kgs 17:40. This
phrase אם לאin this sense occurs in Gen 24:38. On the elliptical כיclause, see §8.4.
Lot’s request in (197) activates the proposition “You will spend the night at
x” and, along with it, the proposition “x = my house.” The three men reject
this value for x with their response, ‘ לאNo’, and then specify “the street” as
the substitute. In (198), God rejects the value “Jacob” for x in the proposition
“Your name will be x.” “Israel” is then substituted for the rejected value.
In other cases, the focused clause follows immediately after the explicit or
implicit rejection of the old value, with no introductory conjunct: 20
The first clause activates the proposition “I give the land to x ” and the as-
sociated proposition “x = you.” The focused clause adds a new value “your
offspring after you,” yielding the proposition “x = you and your offspring after
you.” Additive focusing differs from other types of focus in that it generally
begins with the conjunction ;ו22 the other types are almost always asyndetic.
Additional examples of additive focusing appear in (203)–(205). 23
chio nuts, and almonds. And double the money take with you. . . . And
your brother take.
The last clause, ואת אחיכם קחו, adds their brother to the other items the broth-
ers are to take. The previous clause, וכסף משנה קחו בידכם, is an additive-focus
clause as well, assuming that the expression קחו בידכםis not meant to be taken
literally and the money was to be placed in the brothers’ bags along with the
gifts.
Additive focusing is functionally similar to the focusing adverb גם. For
example, the preposing construction in (202) may be replaced by or supple-
mented with גם: 26
(206) Paraphrase of Gen 35:12 with גם
ואת הארץ אשר נתתי לאברהם וליצחק לך אתננה ונתתי את הארץ גם לזרעך
:אחריך
The land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac, to you I give it. And I give
the land also to your offspring after you.
The clause ויעש גם הוא מטעמיםasserts “x = Esau” with respect to the presup-
posed proposition “x prepared delicacies,” with the implication that the value
“Esau” is added to an earlier value, “Rebekah.” The information that Rebekah
prepared delicacies is presented much earlier in the story, in v. 14. The rela-
tively large distance between the גםclause and the source of the given propo-
sition is apparently no barrier to the use of the focusing adverb. The use of
preposing to mark additive focus in this context, in contrast, would be inappro-
priate and unclear, because the presupposed proposition is no longer activated.
26. As discussed in §5.4.1, focus adverbs can also be combined with preposing.
Mary is marked as the focus by accenting in (208) and (209), both of which
involve clause-level negation. Nevertheless, the two clauses have different
pragmatic interpretations. The focused clause in (208) relates to the activated
negative proposition, “x did not finish the assignment,” and asserts “x = Mary.”
In (209), the activated proposition is the affirmative “x finished the assign-
ment,” and the focused clause asserts “x is not Mary.” 28 The negation here is
external to the activated proposition. This type of focus is termed “focus of
negation.” 29
As seen above, ordinary focusing with negation and focus of negation are
not distinguishable by pitch accent in English; in both types, the focus is ac-
cented. The cleft construction, however, does distinguish the two types:
Example (210) is the cleft equivalent of the ordinary focusing structure with
negation in (208), and (211) is the cleft equivalent of the focus-of-negation
structure in (209). In the cleft versions, the given propositions must be prag-
matically presupposed and are not necessarily activated (although in these ex-
amples they are). The cleft in (211) would be inappropriate as an answer to the
question in (209), because there the proposition “x finished the assignment” is
not presupposed (i.e., the speaker does not know if anyone finished).
In BH, ordinary focusing with negation and focus of negation are repre-
sented by two distinct forms of preposing, in a manner reminiscent of English
clefting. An example of ordinary focusing with negation is the additive clause
in (212). 30
27. The example is adapted from Dryer (1996: 490).
28. Note that in both cases the proposition is activated but not presupposed, because the
speaker does not know whether there is any such x. See further the next paragraph.
29. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 796). See also Jackendoff (1972: 255), where the
phenomenon is termed “association of negation with focus,” and Horn (1989: 515–16).
30. No examples of this type were found in the Genesis corpus.
The focused clause in (214), שלחני′לא י, asserts “x is not the LORD” with
respect to the activated proposition “x sent me.” The activated proposition is
derived from Moses’ previous statement, שלחני′‘ בזאת תדעון כי יby this you
shall know that the Lord has sent me’. At first glance, the focused clause has
an appropriate cleft rendering: ‘It is not the LORD who sent me’. This cleft,
however, implies that someone other than God sent Moses. If God did not send
Moses, however, Moses must have fabricated his mission, as Moses implies in
the previous verse: ‘ כי לא מלביit has not been of my own devising’. The intent
of the conditional in v. 29 is “If these men die a normal death then the LORD did
not send me, that is to say, no one sent me.” It is clear, then, that “x sent me” is
activated but not presupposed information. The cleft rendering inappropriately
converts the activated presupposition into a presupposed one and blocks the
intended implication that no one sent Moses.
An additional example of this type is (215).
The focused clause לא חמור אחד מהם נשאתיasserts “x is not one ass” with
respect to the activated proposition “I took x from them.” 32 The inappropriate-
32. The previous context does not make it clear how the proposition “I took x ” has been
activated. Although this sort of clause would not be counted as focused according to the strict
ness of the cleft rendering here is obvious: “It is not a single ass that I took”
implies that the speaker is guilty of a different theft, whereas Moses’ actual
intent is “I did not take (even) a single ass—in fact, I didn’t take anything!” 33
Focus-of-negation clauses involving presupposition are often followed
by an elliptical clause beginning with the clausal adverb ‘ כיrather’ or כי אם
‘rather’. 34 The second clause functions as a substitutional-focus clause, supply-
ing the correct value for x in the activated proposition:
criteria I followed in classifying the Genesis corpus, it is included in the discussion here
for purposes of illustration. Because the לא+ preposed constituent structure has virtually
no other uses besides focus-of-negation, it is reasonable to assume that focus of negation is
involved in (215) as well. Furthermore, it is intuitively obvious that Moses intends the clause
to be focused. This is plausibly viewed as a case of accommodation (§7.2.1, pp. 108–109),
where in his agitation Moses treats the proposition as activated even though this is not neces-
sarily the case for his addressee.
33. The editors suggest that one can explain the difference between focus-of-negation
clauses that can be rendered by clefts and those that cannot by means of the clause-negation/
constituent-negation distinction. Examples such as (213) and (216) below, where the cleft
is an appropriate rendering, involve constituent negation, whereas examples that cannot be
rendered by clefts, such as (214) and (215), involve clause-level negation. In contrast, I am
claiming that the same level of negation is involved in both cases and that the difference
between the two groups of clauses is solely due to the type of givenness involved.
34. See also (213), above. For an example with כי אם, see (217) below. The particles כי
and כי אםseem largely interchangeable in this usage. Follingstad, however, distinguishes
between the two, claiming that כי אםhas scope over a constituent and marks it for replace-
ment (i.e., substitutional) focus (2001: 563–66), whereas כיhas scope over the entire clause,
marking it for “assertive” focus (2001: 569–83).
35. Although the ( כי )אםclause following a focus-of-negation clause usually undergoes
ellipsis, the full version is occasionally attested, e.g., Lev 21:14 (Richard Steiner, personal
communication). The editors argue that כיfollowing a focus-of-negation clause does not
start a new clause. Rather, כיis the continuation of the focused constituent. In Gen 45:8
(example (213), p. 137 above), it is claimed, there is a discontinuous two-part subject, לא
‘ אתם כי האלהיםnot you but God’. This interpretation is dependent on a constituent-negation
In this example it seems that the adverb עודis external to the activated proposi-
tion, along with the negative; in other words, the activated proposition is “Your
name will be x,” inferred from Jacob’s prior assertion that his name is Jacob,
and the clause asserts “x will no longer be Jacob.” The focused clause is fol-
lowed by an elliptical כי אםclause identifying the correct value for x, “Israel.”
As Blau points out, in each cases the double clause structure can be condensed
into a single clause. Example (218) could have been expressed as והניף את
לרצנכם ממחרת השבת′‘ העמר לפני יhe shall elevate the sheaf before the LORD
for acceptance in your behalf on the day after the Sabbath’, and (219) could
have been expressed as ‘ ויפתר לנו את חלומתינו איש כחלומוand he interpreted
our dreams to us, each man according to his dream’.
In the light of the above discussion of focusing, it can be seen that the pre-
posed clause in the repeating-verb structure is a focused clause. The second
sentence is preposed not simply to create an inclusio but in order to mark the
preposed element as the focus in relation to the proposition expressed by the
first clause. All three clauses involve identificational focus. The examples are
repeated in (221)–(223), with the focused clauses underlined and focuses bold.
37. Paran (1989: 78–79) views this example as exceptional in that it is not from the
Priestly source. He also views its style as different from the one usually employed in the
Priestly source.
38. Although this verse is often taken to be poetry, the appearance of a stylistic device
such as the repeated-verb structure does not necessarily justify the classification of the verse
as poetry, as discussed further on in this section.
In this three-part structure the initial clause, ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו, pro-
vides the activated proposition for the following focused clause, בצם אלהים
ברא אתו. This is technically speaking descriptive focus, although the old value
v and the new value f are semantically identical. The two values differ only
with regard to the form of the expressions involved: where v contains an en-
clitic pronoun, f substitutes the lexical expression אלהים. Next comes an iden-
tificational focus clause, זכר ונקבה ברא אתם. The verb ‘ בראcreated’ recurs in
each of the three clauses in the structure, all of which can be condensed into a
single clause, ‘ ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו זכר ונקבהAnd God created man in
His image, male and female’.
Although on the level of the clause there is nothing exceptional about stylis-
tic focusing, it is worth investigating why in these cases the speaker has chosen
to use a repeated-verb structure with focusing, rather than a simpler mode of
expression. It is plausible that in many cases the repeated-verb structure has
a specific pragmatic function. 39 Pragmatics operates on the discourse level as
well as the clause level, motivating the speaker both to express an idea as a
particular combination of clauses and to structure those clauses in particular
ways. A plausible hypothesis for some of the examples of stylistic focusing is
that they draw the listener’s attention to a constituent that might be otherwise
overlooked or insufficiently appreciated. Bendavid (1971: 857) states that the
repeated verb structure has the purpose of giving “weight to each piece of new
information individually”; a similar view is expressed in Paran (1989). 40 In
(223), for example, the identificational focus על שפך הדשןis brought to atten-
tion to stress that it is here and nowhere else that the offering is to be burnt.
The concept of attentional focus (see §3.3.1.3) may prove to be useful in un-
derstanding this type of function. In other cases, as in (224), focusing may be
motivated more by esthetics than by pragmatics.
A separate issue is whether “stylistic” focusing serves as an indication that
a segment of text is poetry rather than prose. Example (224), for example, is
considered poetry in many Bible translations, including NRSV, NAB, and NJB.
Although investigation of this issue is beyond the scope of this work, it is
worthwhile to note that “poetic” devices are widespread even in ordinary lan-
guage use. As Jakobsen (1967: 302) writes, “Any attempt to reduce the sphere
of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a
39. Stylistic devices often have pragmatic functions, although in some cases the func-
tion is purely esthetic. Watson (1984: 32–34) states that poetic devices may have functions
related to structure or esthetics, among other functions. Structural functions are pragmatic,
whereas esthetic functions are not. According to Wimsatt (1967: 369 n. 31) the meaning of
stylistic devices may be “emotive,” function that may or may not be included in pragmatics.
40. Paran suggests that the device is also intended to facilitate memorization of the text
(1989: ix). According to Blau (1972: 237), the device reflects an oral style that was originally
used to express an afterthought. He also suggests that the preposed element serves as the
“psychological predicate” of the previous sentence.
8.6. Conclusion
The activated proposition relating to a focused clause may be derived from
the textual or extratextual context. Activation frequently goes hand-in-hand
with presupposition, but there are many examples of focused clauses in which
presupposition is not involved. Focusing in commands and requests generally
does not involve presupposition.
Focused clauses may be identificational, descriptive, substitutional, or ad-
ditive, depending on the relation the focus bears to previously activated values
for x. Substitutional clauses that replace previously negated values for x may
be introduced by the conjuncts כי, כי אם, or אם לא. Additive focusing and the
focusing adverb גםare in some ways similar, but the two devices involve dif-
ferent types of given information. The focusing adverb relates to presupposed
but not necessarily activated information, whereas additive focusing by prepar-
ing relates to activated but not necessarily presupposed information.
Focus of negation is a special type of focusing with a distinct syntactic
form. Like ordinary focus, focus of negation also relates to an activated but
not necessarily presupposed proposition. The English cleft is an appropriate
rendering only for focus-of-negation constructions involving presupposition.
Focus-of-negation clauses involving presupposition may be followed by an
elliptical כיor כי אםclause supplying the correct value for x.
There are stylistic uses of focusing in which a repetitive structure is inten-
tionally set up containing a focused clause. The purpose of a structure of this
sort may be to set up the focused constituent as a focus of attention.
41. I am indebted to Michael O’Connor for bringing this reference to my attention. See
also Berlin (1985: 3–5).
42. According to Muilenberg (1953), repetition is a characteristic stylistic feature of
biblical narrative as well as poetry. See also Holes (1995), who shows that repetition and
parallelism can be found in the everyday speech of certain communities of nonliterate Arabic
speakers, and Johnstone (1991), who discusses the use of repetition and parallelism in differ-
ent types of nonpoetic Arabic discourse. See also the discussion in §1.2.
(225) Subject
:ויקרא לו לבן יגר שהדותא ויעקב קרא לו גלעד
Laban called it Jegar-sahadutha; and Jacob called it Galeed. (Gen 31:47)
(226) Complement
:את בנתם נקח לנו לנשים ואת בנתינו נתן להם
We will take their daughters for ourselves as wives, and our daughters
we will give to them. (Gen 34:21)
144
(227) Adjunct
ויחפש בגדול החל ובקטן כלה
And he searched: with the eldest he began, and with the youngest he
ended. (Gen 44:12)
Table 15 shows the frequency of the various syntactic functions of the pre-
posed constituents in topicalized clauses from Genesis. Complement/adjunct-
preposed topicalization is somewhat more common than the subject-preposed
type. As shown in table 16, the preposed constituent is most frequently a noun
phrase but may also be a prepositional phrase or, more rarely, an infinitive
clause or adverb. About 60% of preposed constituents are noun phrases.
In contrast to the preposed item, the counterpart of the preposed item need
not be present in the surface structure of the text. A subject counterpart in (228)
and a complement counterpart in (229) have been deleted from the surface
structure. 1 The deleted items are indicated in brackets.
9.2. The link between the preposed item and its counterpart
The link between the preposed item and its counterpart generally pertains
to the referents of the linked items, rather than to the expressions themselves. 3
Because preposing is normally performed on entire clause-level constituents,
the preposed constituent may contain material that is irrelevant to the link with
the counterpart. Prepositions are extraneous to the link:
2. The topicalized clause in (230) is forward-linking (see §9.3), with the preposed item
and its counterpart linked by a relation of identity. The counterpart itself contains two items
linked by topicalization: ‘ אחיכם האחדone of your brothers’ is linked to את רעבון בתיכם
‘[something for] the famine of your households’. The former is to be left behind and the
latter taken back to Canaan. Additional examples of clauses or groups of clauses serving as
counterparts are Gen 42:15–16, 18–20; 43:11–13; 45:17–18.
3. In Gen 48:11, however, the link concerns the meaning of the preposed infinitive
clause ‘ ראה פניךseeing your face’ and the meaning of the following verse.
4. The NRSV translates ‘all of them’ instead of ‘Calneh’, emending the vocalization to
ֻכּלָּנָה.
5. The NRSV translates ‘From that land he went into Assyria’, taking Ashur as the object
rather than the subject of the clause.
Preposed מידיin the second clause has אנכיin the preceding clause as its coun-
terpart. The word ידיis part of the idiomatic expression ‘ בקש מידhold re-
sponsible’ and has no independent meaning and hence no reference. The link
obtains between the referents of אנכיand the coreferential enclitic pronoun in
the phrase מידי. A more idiomatic rendering of the verse would be ‘I will be
surety for him; you may hold me responsible’, with the linked items marked
in bold.
An examination of topicalization in Genesis and elsewhere reveals a wide
variety in the links obtaining between the linked items. The common denomi-
nator in all cases is a contextual relation between the referents of the preposed
item and counterpart; that is, the referents function as a pair in the discourse
context. I refer to the referents of the linked items as A and B, where A is the
item found in the first segment and B is in the second segment.
In most instances of topicalization, A and B have been mentioned just be-
fore the linked segments in a way that establishes them as a pair. Examples are
shown in (233) and (234). 7
(233) Gen 1:4–5
ויקרא:וירא אלהים את האור כי טוב ויבדל אלהים בין האור ובין החשך
אלהים לאור יום ולחשך קרא לילה
And God saw that the light was good; and God separated between the
light and the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness
He called Night.
In (233), light and darkness are mentioned together in the preceding verse;
similarly, in (234) Rachel and Leah are named just before as Laban’s two
daughters. In these examples, as in many others, A and B bear a logical rela-
tion that automatically establishes a contextual link: light and darkness are
opposites, and Rachel and Leah are members of the set of Laban’s children.
In some cases, neither A nor B has been previously mentioned, but they nev-
ertheless bear a logical relation to each other. An example is (235), in which
the linked items, the pure animals and the impure animals, are mentioned for
this first time. Since these constitute subsets of the set of all animals, a link
between them is automatically established. 8
Abraham and God are not a natural pair, but they are linked by the prior context
by virtue of being mutually engaged in conversation. Another ad-hoc pair is
shown in (237).
8. See also Gen 19:3, where the preposed ‘ מצותunleavened bread’ bears a part-whole
relation to ‘ משתהa feast’ in the previous clause.
9. The idea of the ad hoc link is discussed in Birner and Ward (1998: 234). Note that
these scholars use the term link somewhat differently to refer to the referent of the preposed
constituent rather than to a relation between that referent and another item (1998: 20).
The topicalized clause והאדמה לא תשםis linked to the previous two clauses,
ונחיה ולא נמות. The preposed element האדמהis linked to the implicit subject
pronoun in the preceding segment, ( אנחנוi.e., the people). A contextual link
between the land and the people was established previously in the verse, where
the people propose to sell themselves and their land to Pharaoh. The pair /אנחנו
גויתנוand אדמתנוoccur in coordinated or appositive phrases no less than three
times in the preceding text (shown above in bold), making the link impossible
to miss.
In some cases a previously nonexistent ad hoc relation is established by the
linked clauses themselves:
In this example, A is the referent of the omitted object אותםin the first under-
lined clause, that is, Esau’s clothes mentioned in the previous verse. B is the
goat skins. It is hard to think of a natural relation obtaining between Esau’s
clothes and the goat skins, outside of this particular context. Nevertheless, be-
cause the clauses referring to these items describe similar actions performed
with the two items—both are used to clothe Jacob—a link is established be-
tween the two. Other unnatural pairs of this sort include, among others: the
wood of a wagon and the cows pulling the wagon (1 Sam 6:14), the head of
the dead Philistine and his weapons (1 Sam 17:54), and a household idol and
a goat’s hair quilt (1 Sam 19:13). 10 The link between each of these pairs is
perfectly comprehensible in its context: the wood and the cows are both used
in preparing a sacrifice, the Philistine’s head and his weapons are retrieved
from the battlefield as war trophies, and the idol and quilt are used to simu-
late the form of David’s body lying under the covers. Idiosyncratic examples
like these make it clear that logical relations like partially ordered set relations
(see §6.2.1.1), even if involved in some instances of topicalization, are beside
the point.
A notable type of link is between two items with identical reference. The
first item is often a lexical expression and the second a coreferential expres-
sion containing a personal pronoun (independent or enclitic), as in (239), or a
demonstrative pronoun, as in (240). 11
12. Additional examples include Gen 1:27; 7:19; 8:5; 9:23; 11:27; 40:13, 19; and 41:50.
13. Additional examples include Gen 9:19, 10:32, 31:39, 36:14, 41:40, 43:9, and 46:4.
14. These are the “chiastic” structures discussed by Andersen and Khan (see §3.1.1).
Additional representative examples include Gen 1:5, 1:10, 4:2, 12:12, 18:33, 24:53, 25:5–6,
25:33–34, 31:47, 33:16–17, 35:18, 37:11, 40:21–22, and 41:51–52.
The initial underlined clause marks a relation between the preposed מכל עץ הגן
and the expression in the following clause, מעץ הדעת טוב ורע.
Forward-linking topicalization is almost always asyndetic. 16 The syndesis/
asyndesis opposition between backward- and forward-linking topicalization
15. These are Andersen’s (1974) and Khan’s (1988) “parallel” structures (see §3.1.1).
An exception to this rule is Gen 45:17, where a forward-linking topicalization is followed by
a clause with normal word order.
16. One exception is Gen 50:20, where the waw is attached to the first topicalized clause,
rather than the second, as would be expected: ואתם חשבתם עלי רעה אלהים חשבה לטבה למען
:‘ עשה כיום הזה להחית עם רבAnd you intended me harm, God intended it for good, to bring
it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today’.
guides the addressee in correctly identifying the linked segment. If the topi-
calized clause is syndetic, the linked segment precedes. If it is asyndetic, the
linked segment lies ahead. Additional examples of forward-linking topicaliza-
tion are shown in (247) and (248). 17
The counterpart of the preposed item is at the head of the gapped clause, and
the verb, along with other material identical to that in the topicalized clause,
has been omitted. The gapped material is shown in brackets. 19
In several instances, a forward-linking topicalization is followed by left-
dislocation: 20
17. See also, e.g., Gen 3:2; 14:4; 31:38, 40; 34:9, 21; 42:19, 33; and 44:12, as well as
examples (249)–(250).
18. Appears as (235) above (p. 148).
19. A similar example is Gen 31:40. This verse shows that verb gapping does occur in
BH prose, contrary to O’Connor’s (1980: 401) denial of this possibility, discussed above in
§1.2. Additional examples of verb-gapping in prose can be found in (254) below. See Kugel
(1981: 321–22) for some additional examples.
20. An additional example is Gen 3:2. In Exod 1:22, a left-dislocation is followed by a
topicalized clause.
The linked items in this example are מכל עץ הגןand מעץ הדעת טוב ורע. The
first item is preposed, and the second is dislocated, with a resumptive enclitic
pronoun.
When the segments linked by topicalization are larger than a single clause,
the preposed item and its counterpart occur in the first clause of their respective
segments. Large discourse segments are often involved when the linked items
are time adverbials. The segments include all of the clauses referring to events
occurring at the designated time:
The first segment encompasses all of the clauses in v. 13, and the second seg-
ment consists of the topicalized clause in v. 14.
Although topicalization most frequently links two segments, chains of
linked segments also occur: 22
The complete chain contains 12 segments. The first clause in each segment
contains a time adverbial: ביום השני, ביום הראשוןand so on. The first segment
opens with a clause with normal word order, and the second segment begins
with a backward-linking topicalized clause. The initial clause in the rest of the
segments has a preposed time adverbial and a gapped verb; for example, ביום
‘ השלישי ]הקריב[ נשיא לבני זבולן אליאב בן חלןOn the third day the leader of the
children of Zebulun, Eliab son of Helon [made an offering]’ (v. 24). 24
9.4.1. Opposition
Segments linked by topicalization most frequently stand in a relation of op-
position: the linked items in the segments are marked in order to highlight the
difference between what is said about them. The opposition between the two
segments might be expressed in English by the conjunct adverbial in contrast;
the closest equivalent in BH is אולם, although use of this conjunct is much less
24. Another long chain involving fronted time adverbials is found in the passage de-
scribing the offerings for the Sabbath and festivals (Num 28:9–29:38).
25. In a few cases, it is difficult to identify a specific coherence relation; these are Gen
2:10; 7:18–19; 10:11; 19:6, 10–11; 25:10; and 46:32.
26. Additional representative examples include Gen 1:10, 2:16–17, 4:5, 7:2, 12:12,
13:12, 14:21, 15:10, 25:5–6, and 50:20.
27. Appears above as (228) (p. 145).
The two clauses in this example are syntactically and semantically parallel,
just as in the examples above. Here, however, there is no part of the topicalized
clause that can be interpreted as a focus, because the fact that Jacob gave Ben-
jamin a different name is unexpected information that is not inferrable from
the preceding clause.
When the linked segments do not exhibit parallel structure, as is often the
case, there is no possibility of an unmarked focus. The opposition is inferred
from the content of the two clauses: 28
and evil, you shall not eat from it, for on the day that you eat from it you
shall die.”
In (260), man is given permission to eat from every tree in the garden. The
subsequent clause makes it clear that this means every tree except for the Tree
of Knowledge. Similarly, in (261), כל הארצותactually means all of the lands
except for the land of Egypt. 30 Recognizing the link between the items in the
two segments and the coherence relation between the segments is critical for
the proper understanding of the first segment. By explicitly marking the links,
topicalization plays an important role in guiding the addressee to the intended
semantic interpretation.
Another interesting type of oppositional topicalization involves an a for-
tiori argument (‘ קל וחמרthe argument from the minor to the major’). In this
type of argument, a speaker argues for a proposition p by asserting or implying
a weaker version of p, from which the stronger version naturally follows: “if
the ‘minor’ has this or that property then the ‘major’ must undoubtedly have
it” ( Jacobs 1972: 221). An example is (262).
(262) Gen 44:8
הן כסף אשר מצאנו בפי אמתחתינו השיבנו אליך מארץ כנען ואיך נגנב מבית
אדניך כסף או זהב
Behold, the money which we found in the mouth of our sacks, we
brought back to you from the land of Canaan, and how could we have
stolen from your master’s house silver or gold?
The linked items are כסף אשר מצאנו בפי אמתחתנוand כסף או זהב. The first seg-
ment is a forward-linking topicalized clause with the clausal adverb הן, 31 and
30. A slightly different type is לכלם נתן לאיש חלפות שמלת ולבנימן נתן שלש מאות כסף
‘ וחמש חלפת שמלתTo each of them he gave a change of clothing, and to Benjamin he gave
300 pieces of silver and five changes of clothing’ (Gen 45:22). The topicalized clause does
not contradict the literal meaning of the previous one, because Benjamin, like his brothers,
received a change of clothing (following most translations, which take חלפותas referring
to a single set of clothing.) Instead, the contradiction is between the implication of the first
clause that the brothers (including Benjamin) received only a change of clothing and the fol-
lowing assertion that Benjamin received a large sum of money in addition to five changes
of clothing.
31. On the use of הןin a fortiori arguments, see Blau (1993: §103.2); Garr (2004: 332).
the second segment is a rhetorical question. The rhetorical question implies the
assertion “We did not steal gold or silver from Joseph’s house.” Topicalization
highlights the “minor/major” relation between the linked items: “the money
which we found in the mouth of our sack” is money that the brothers could
have been justified in keeping, whereas they had no right to “silver or gold”
from Joseph’s house. “If we returned the money that we could have kept for
ourselves,” the brothers say, “we certainly would not steal Joseph’s money.”
The use of topicalization in a fortiori arguments occurs elsewhere in the
classical BH prose corpus as well, as shown in the following examples.
As in (262) above (p. 158), the arguments in these examples start with a
topicalized clause beginning with הןor הנה, followed by a rhetorical question.
In (265), the rhetorical question is topicalized as well. In (266), the topicalized
clause is followed by an elliptical clause introduced with ‘ אף כיhow much
more so’. 33 Everything in the elliptical clause has been omitted except for the
linked item. In each case, a forward-linking topicalization highlights a “minor/
major” relation between the linked items and an oppositional relation between
the segments.
32. The rhetorical question here is unmarked, lacking an interrogative particle or adverb.
33. For additional examples (not necessarily involving topicalization of a finite clause)
of the אף כי. . . הנה/ הןsequence, see 1 Sam 23:3 and 2 Sam 16:11. The phrase אף כיoccurs
without preceding הנה/ הןin 1 Sam 14:29–30; Prov 15:11; 19:7, 10. See Labuschagne (1973:
7) and Stec (1987: 479–80).
9.4.2. Similarity
Segments linked by topicalization frequently stand in a relation of similar-
ity, a relation that might be expressed in English by the conjunct similarly or
likewise. The distinction between opposition and similarity is not completely
determined by the content of the clauses but depends on whether the speaker
views what is said about the linked items as different or similar. As such, simi-
larity and opposition are epistemic rather than content relations. The distinc-
tion between opposition and similarity is at times very subtle, and some similar
segments are apt to be taken at first glance as oppositional. Unlike the relation
of opposition, the similarity relation may obtain in a chain of linked segments.
A relation of similarity is obvious when closely related things are stated
about each of the linked items. A chain of topicalized segments of this type
from the classical BH prose corpus is shown in (267):
(267) Deut 7:5
כי אם כה תעשו להם מזבחתיהם תתצו ומצבתם תשברו ואשירהם תגדעון
ופסיליהם תשרפון באש
But thus shall you do to them: their altars you shall break down, and
their pillars you shall smash, and their sacred posts you shall cut down,
and their graven images you shall burn with fire.
The verbs in the linked clauses denote various types of destruction. The series
of topicalized clauses highlights the common action that is to be performed on
all of the cultic objects mentioned in the clauses. 34
Paradoxically, a relation of similarity may exist even when what is stated
about the linked items involves antonyms or near-antonyms:
In this verse, the similarity between God’s and Abram’s departure is high-
lighted, rather than an opposition between their different destinations or be-
tween God’s going and Abram’s returning. In rendering the verse, similarly
yields a more suitable result than in contrast: ‘And God left when he finished
speaking to Abram. Similarly/in contrast Abram returned to his place’.
Topicalization chains in genealogy passages involve the similarity relation.
This is a frequent type of topicalization in Genesis: 38
(271) Gen 4:18
ויולד לחנוך את עירד ועירד ילד את מחויאל ומחייאל ילד את מתושאל
:ומתושאל ילד את למך
And Irad was born to Enoch; and Irad fathered Mehujael, and Mehu-
jael fathered Methushael, and Methushael fathered Lamech.
The point here is the continuation of the chain of lineage, rather than an op-
position between the names. 39
9.4.3. Addition
The additive relation pertains to speech acts rather than speaker reasoning
and can be paraphrased as “I say in addition.” In English, conjuncts such as
furthermore and moreover mark an additive relation, and in BH the conjunct
גםmay be used for this purpose, as an alternative to or in combination with
36. See also, e.g., Gen 1:20, 22; and 45:14. A number of cases are ambiguous, admitting
either oppositional or similarity interpretations; these include Gen 24:53, 25:33–34, 31:40,
32:1–2, and 40:21–22.
37. Appears as (237) above (p. 148).
38. Additional representative examples of topicalized clauses in genealogy passages in-
clude Gen 10:8, 13–14, 15–18, 24 (2×), 25, 26–29; 11:12, 14, 27 (2×).
39. In this example and others like it, there is an ambiguity regarding the counterparts of
the preposed items. In the second clause, for example, Irad may be linked with the previous
mention of this individual in the preceding clause (bold). Alternatively, Irad may be linked
with his father, Enoch.
In (272), Jacob justifies his assertion that he has been and will be bereaved by
the brothers with a three-part proof. Two nonverbal clauses are followed by a
topicalized clause. In (273), the brothers specify two penalties they will incur
if the thief is among them. The first clause takes the form of a left-dislocation,
whereas the second is a topicalized clause containing the conjunct גם. 42
9.4.4. Elaboration, summary, and paraphrase
Elaboration, summary, and paraphrase are coherence relations that concern
speech acts. There are no linguistic markers that explicitly signal the elabora-
tion relation in English or in BH; the summary and paraphrase relations can be
marked in English by to sum up and that is to say, respectively. Topicalization
involving elaboration, summary, or paraphrase generally involves segments
with identical linked items.
In one pattern of the elaborative type, a forward-linking topicalization with
a preposed demonstrative pronoun is followed by a segment consisting of sev-
eral clauses: 43
(274) Gen 45:17–18
ויאמר פרעה אל יוסף אמר אל אחיך זאת עשו טענו את בעירכם ולכו באו
וקחו את אביכם ואת בתיכם ובאו אלי:ארצה כנען
And Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Say to your brothers, ‘Thus you shall do:
load up your beasts and come to the land of Canaan. And take your
father and your households, and come to me.’”
40. Clauses linked by an additive relation usually resemble each other in content, mak-
ing it hard at times to determine whether similarity or addition is intended. Ambiguous ex-
amples include Gen 31:38, 39:8, and 41:40.
41. The word גםshould be interpreted here as a conjunct rather than a focusing adverb
(see §5.2). See also Gen 21:26.
42. An additional example with גםis Gen 44:9.
43. Additional examples include Gen 42:15–16, 18–20, 33–34; 43:11–13; and 45:19.
44. Additional examples include Gen 8:5, 11:27, 36:1–3, and 40:18–19.
45. Appears as (245) above (p. 151).
46. An additional example is Gen 36:13.
47. Appears as (240) above (p. 150).
48. An additional example is the very similar Gen 31:39.
49. Appears above as (232) (p. 147).
50. It is common for the first-time adjunct to express duration and the second-time ad-
junct to express a point in time immediately following the specified time span, as in this
example. Additional representative examples from the classical BH prose corpus include
Exod 22:29; 31:17; 35:2; Lev 12:2–3; 15:28–29; 19:23–24; Deut 15:12; Josh 6:3–4; 1 Kgs
8:65–66; 2 Kgs 11:3–4.
51. See also (253) and (254) (p. 154), above. Other examples include the synchronistic
verses in Kings in which preposed time adverbials mark long segments describing a king’s
reign, for example, ‘ ובשנת עשרים לירבעם מלך ישראל מלך אסא מלך יהודהAnd in the twentieth
year of Jeroboam the king of Israel, Asa the king of Judah became king’ (1 Kgs 15:9).
52. The temporal adverbial is connected to its clause by a conjunction (see §5.5.2).
53. Following the standard translation, the phrase “in the fourth month” is filled in from
the parallel passage in Jer 52:6.
the double walls, which is by the king’s garden, and the Chaldeans were
all around the city. And they went in the direction of the Arabah. . . . And
in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month (that was the
nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon) Nebu-
zaradan, the captain of the bodyguard, a servant of the king of Babylon,
came to Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the LORD, and the king’s
house and all the houses of Jerusalem; and every great house he burned
down.
The events in the first segment do not necessarily all precede the events in the
second; that is, it is not clear that Zedekiah reached Babylon before the seventh
day of the fifth month. The segments are nevertheless temporally successive
in that the first sequence begins prior to the inception of the second sequence.
9.5. Conclusion
Topicalization functions as a discourse-connective device, signaling that the
marked clause bears a coherence relation to an adjacent discourse segment, ei-
ther preceding or following. Topicalization marks the preposed item as linked
to an item in the first clause of the adjacent segment; the linked items bear a
contextual relation which may be of a logical or ad hoc nature.
The specific coherence relation between the linked segments is not speci-
fied by topicalization. By examining the segments in the light of the linked
items, the addressee infers the intended relation between the clauses. The most
common relations are opposition and similarity, both of which are epistemic
relations. Opposition always obtains between a pair of linked segments, while
similarity may involve a topicalization chain. Oppositional segments may or
may not exhibit parallel semantic and syntactic structure. In some cases, the
relation between the linked items is crucial to the semantic interpretation of the
two segments, as in the case of literally contradictory segments. Oppositional
segments also occur in a fortiori arguments, highlighting the “major/minor”
relation crucial to the argument.
Topicalization may involve a speech act relation such as addition, elabora-
tion, summary, or paraphrase. The last three types are characteristic of topi-
calization involving identical linked items. When linked time adjuncts are
involved, the coherence relation is the content relation of temporal succession.
This type may involve a chain of long discourse segments, each describing a
series of sequential events.
The topicalized clause, at least in the Genesis corpus, always occurs in the
context of a second segment to which it is related. In contrast, the focused
clause can occur as an isolated clause, relating to information activated by the
extratextual situation.
Conclusion
167
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