At the interface of syntax and prosody: Differentiating left dislocated and tripartite verbless clauses in Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

The "tripartite" verbless clause has two noun phrases and a third-person pronoun (PRON), as in "the LORD, he (is) God" (Deut 4:35). PRON has been read as a copula, as the resumption of a left-dislocated subject, or as either depending on pragmatics (Holmstedt and Jones 2014). The authors argue that it is neither a copula nor always resumptive, but a "last resort" pronominal clitic that supplies subject agreement when the predicate is itself a referring phrase, so that subject and predicate are not confused. They decide each case by the Masoretic accents as prosodic evidence: in a true tripartite clause the subject and PRON form one prosodic unit (a conjunctive accent or maqqef, PRON often unaccented), while a left-dislocated subject is cut off by a disjunctive accent and the pronoun has its own accent. Re-examining Holmstedt and Jones's lists, a sizeable share of their cases come out the other way.

Ideas

• I1. Use the accent between the first NP and the pronoun as the decision rule: conjunctive or maqqef → tripartite clause (PRON attached as cop or expl, one clause); disjunctive → left dislocation (dislocated first NP, pronoun as nsubj). Count both classes in the Torah.
• I2. Apply the same accent test to other ambiguities the paper cites: attributive vs predicative participle (Deut 26:5, a disjunctive on the first word means subject + predicate) and quote boundaries (Isa 40:3).
• I3. Measure how often the trees' current attachment agrees with the accent-based reading, and against PTNK.

For Mova

I1 and I3 are a rule and a measure in tools/macula (the accent class of each word is in MACULA's data), documented in Syntax: the clause and the sentence (verbless clauses, dislocation) and 02-cantillation.md (accents as syntax). I2 gives tools/macula/src/prag.rs a cue for where a quote starts, and the examples go into chapter 2.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5774/48-0-293

@inproceedings{naude2018at,
  title = {{At the interface of syntax and prosody: Differentiating left dislocated and tripartite verbless clauses in Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Naudé, Jacobus A. and Miller-Naudé, Cynthia L.},
  booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5774/48-0-293},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5774/48-0-293}
}

References

3 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Albrecht, C. 1887. Die Wortstellung im hebräischen Nominalsatze. Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 7: 218-224. find
2. Albrecht, C. 1888. Die Wortstellung im hebräischen Nominalsatze: Teil II. Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 8: 249-263. find
3. Andersen, F. I. 1970. The Hebrew verbless clause in the Pentateuch. Journal of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 14. New York and Nashville: Abingdon. find

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