Syntactic Variation in Masoretic Hebrew: The Object Clause Reconsidered

What it is about

The full text is not in the library; this card rests on the publisher's abstract, so the ideas are provisional. The paper takes two features of object clauses that have been used to date biblical texts: the order of a subject pronoun and a nominal predicate inside certain object clauses, and the choice between כִּי and אֲשֶׁר as the word that introduces an object clause ("he saw that …"). Instead of arguing from a handful of examples, the authors query every case in the Masoretic Text with the SHEBANQ / ETCBC tools, and ask how much variation there really is and what it can say about the date of a book.

Ideas

• I1. Count the complementiser of object clauses in the Torah trees: ccomp (or obj headed by a clause) introduced by כִּי vs אֲשֶׁר, per book and per governing verb (רָאָה, יָדַע, שָׁמַע, אָמַר). Expectation from the literature: כִּי dominates in the Torah, אֲשֶׁר as complementiser is rarer and later.
• I2. In verbless object clauses, count pronoun–predicate vs predicate–pronoun order ("that he is X" vs "that X he is").
• I3. Method point for chapter 12: a dating feature counts only when measured over all its cases with the conditioning factors (verb, genre) held apart, not from a few contrasting examples.

For Mova

I1 and I2 are counts on torah-wlc-macula for Syntax: the clause and the sentence (objects, subordination) and 05-pronouns-particles.md (כִּי, אֲשֶׁר); they also check that tools/macula attaches כִּי/אֲשֶׁר object clauses as ccomp with mark. I3 belongs to the dating debate in 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.25159/1013-8471/2566

@article{naaijer2017syntactic,
  title = {{Syntactic Variation in Masoretic Hebrew: The Object Clause Reconsidered}},
  author = {Naaijer, Martijn and Roorda, Dirk},
  journal = {Journal for Semitics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.25159/1013-8471/2566},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.25159/1013-8471/2566}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2017-naaijer-syntactic-variation-masoretic-hebrew-object/