A functional profile of Left Dislocation in Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

From over 650 verbal left-dislocation (LD) tokens in Genesis–2 Kings (his 2014 thesis), the author sets out seven overlapping construction types around a typological prototype, then their functions. Prototype (about 20%): a referring phrase before and detached from the clause, resumed inside it by a pronoun, suffix or epithet ("from the tree of knowledge …, you shall not eat from it", Gen 2:17). Others: non-resumptive LD (about 7%, detached by a clause-boundary וְ or wayyiqtol, or no free valency slot); multiple LD (several dislocates); pronominal LD (about 2%); anaphoric כֵּן (about 7%, a כַּאֲשֶׁר/כְּ phrase resumed by fronted כֵּן "so"); conditional LD (about 5%, a noun or indefinite before a כִּי/אִם protasis, nearly always casuistic law: "a man or a woman, if they commit …", Num 5:6); and temporal LD (a time expression, often after וַיְהִי). The core function is to (re)activate a referent of low accessibility, splitting "who" from "what role"; on top of that it announces a topic (primary = subject, secondary = object), a focus, or a frame without a resumptive (1 Sam 2:13). With an already active referent, LD is a non-prototypical, marked use that triggers extra implicatures.

Ideas

• I1. Write the seven types as detectors over our trees, each with its fixed cue: resumptive pronoun/suffix agreeing with the fronted NP; כַּאֲשֶׁר … כֵּן; NP + כִּי/אִם + protasis in law; time phrase + וְ/wayyiqtol; dislocated pronoun. Count each type in the Torah and compare with the paper's shares for Genesis–Kings.
• I2. Conditional LD is the casuistic law opening (אִישׁ אוֹ אִשָּׁה כִּי …; נֶפֶשׁ כִּי …): a prag rule that marks the sentence as a legal case (form: conditional, act: law) and links the dislocate to the actor of the apodosis.
• I3. Accessibility as the trigger: test whether dislocated referents in the Torah were last mentioned far back (sentence distance) or never, against fronted-but-not-dislocated subjects; a measurable check of the paper's claim.
• I4. UD annotation: dislocate → dislocated on the clause head, resumptive keeps its own role; anaphoric כֵּן → advmod with the כַּאֲשֶׁר clause as advcl of the main verb.

For Mova

I1 and I4 go into Syntax: the clause and the sentence (dislocation) and the head rules of tools/macula (13-mova-tools.md §6). I2 is a candidate rule (law3 is the nearest existing one) in tools/macula/src/prag.rs, described in 09-discourse.md (procedure and law). I3 is a count for 09-discourse.md (participant tracking).

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5842/50-0-717

@inproceedings{westbury2016functional,
  title = {{A functional profile of Left Dislocation in Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Westbury, Josh},
  booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.5842/50-0-717},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5842/50-0-717}
}

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