An overview of recent developments in the description of Biblical Hebrew relevant to Bible translation

What it is about

Not read: the PDF is not in the library. From the title and the author's other surveys: a review, for Bible translators, of what linguistics changed in the description of Biblical Hebrew in the 1990s — the verbal system (aspect, tense, discourse functions of wayyiqtol and weqatal), word order and information structure (topic and focus in the pre-verbal slot), discourse markers (וְהִנֵּה, וַיְהִי, וְעַתָּה, כִּי), and cognitive-semantic lexicography (the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew). Van der Merwe is a co-author of a reference grammar and of several studies of discourse particles. Check against the text.

Ideas

• I1. (to check) Use the survey as a checklist for the manual: every topic it names should have a section in languages/hbo/ and a statement of how Mova handles it.
• I2. (to check) Discourse markers as a closed class with functions rather than glosses: one table (marker → function → our rule → count) in the discourse chapter.

For Mova

I1 is an audit of languages/hbo/ chapters 6, 8, 9 and 10; I2 goes into 09-discourse.md and src/prag.rs. A survey paper: its value is the map, not new data. Re-read once the PDF is in.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4314/actat.v22i1.5462

@inproceedings{merwe2004overview,
  title = {{An overview of recent developments in the description of Biblical Hebrew relevant to Bible translation}},
  author = {Merwe, Christo H. J. van der},
  booktitle = {Acta Theologica},
  year = {2004},
  doi = {10.4314/actat.v22i1.5462},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4314/actat.v22i1.5462}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2004-merwe-overview-recent-developments-description-biblical/