NP References to Active Participants and Story Development in Ancient Hebrew

What it is about

The full text is not in the library (the download was blocked); this card rests on the repository's abstract, so the ideas are provisional. Languages usually name an already active participant with a full noun phrase, instead of a pronoun or verb agreement, in two places even when the subject does not change: at the start of a narrative unit and to highlight a speech or action. Comparing Hebrew narrative with two languages that mark new developments with a conjunction or preverbal particle, Levinsohn finds Hebrew uses many more full NPs for active participants, and argues that in Hebrew a full NP also marks a new development in the story: the work other languages give to a particle.

Ideas

• I1. Count, in Torah narrative, wayyiqtol clauses with an explicit subject NP whose referent was already the subject of the previous clause (no switch). These are the candidate "development" or "highlight" points.
• I2. A prag/discourse rule: same-subject full NP after a wayyiqtol chain → new development / unit boundary; check against the paragraph marks (petuhot/setumot) and the JPS paragraphing.
• I3. Participant tracking: before treating a full NP as a switch of subject, compare it with the last subject; keep "same referent, renamed" as a separate category.

For Mova

I1–I3 apply to participant tracking in Discourse: narrative, speech and the shape of a text and to tools/macula/src/prag.rs (a segment/boundary signal next to the speech-frame carrying). The count runs on the Torah trees with lemma identity as a cheap proxy for coreference.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.31356/silwp.vol44.01

@inproceedings{levinsohn2018np,
  title = {{NP References to Active Participants and Story Development in Ancient Hebrew}},
  author = {Levinsohn, Stephen H.},
  booktitle = {Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics University of North Dakota Session},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.31356/silwp.vol44.01},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.31356/silwp.vol44.01}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2018-levinsohn-np-references-active-participants-story/