Is Biblical Hebrew a non-configurational language? Reconsidering the evidence from discontinuous phrases

What it is about

Some scholars (Andersen and Forbes among them) call Biblical Hebrew non-configurational, partly because of apparently discontinuous phrases such as "and the two sons of Eli died, Hophni and Pinehas" (1 Sam 4:11). Reviewing typological work (Hale, Rijkhoff, Krasnoukhova, Dixon), the author separates the appositional, flat "phrases" of languages like Warlpiri from true discontinuous phrases, defined narrowly as one restrictive phrase split within one intonation unit. Biblical Hebrew has only a handful of possible true cases, nearly all with an adjective as the separated part (e.g. Song 8:8, Deut 15:9). The rest are better explained as afterthought or right dislocation (a coreferential, non-restrictive phrase outside the clause, usually of the same form as what it resumes) or as extraposition (a long restrictive constituent, typically a relative clause, moved to the end for processing). Without prosody the choice often stays open; the accents may help but are not decisive.

Ideas

I1. Count, in the Torah trees, clause-final nominals that corefer with an earlier argument and are separated from it (names after "the two sons of X", "all of them, men and women"): attach them as appos or dislocated to the earlier noun, not as new arguments.
I2. A test from the paper: same form as the resumed element (NP~NP, PP~PP) and non-restrictive → afterthought (dislocated); restrictive relative separated from its head → extraposition (acl:relcl to the distant head). Measure both against PTNK's choices.
I3. Use the accents as a weak cue: a strong disjunctive before the final phrase favours afterthought; count how often it holds on the cases found in I1.

For Mova

I1 and I2 are head rules in tools/macula and a section in Syntax: the clause and the sentence (dislocation, apposition, relative clauses), measured with macula compare against PTNK. I3 links 02-cantillation.md (accents as syntax) to the same cases; the accent level is in the source data.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.7146/hn.v5i2.142732

@inproceedings{kaajan2019is,
  title = {{Is Biblical Hebrew a non-configurational language? Reconsidering the evidence from discontinuous phrases}},
  author = {Kaajan, Marianne},
  booktitle = {HIPHIL Novum 5},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.7146/hn.v5i2.142732},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142732}
}

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.

Andersen, F. I., and A. D. Forbes. 2012. Biblical Hebrew grammar visualized. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. find
Blake, B. J. 1983. "Structure and word order in Kalkatungu: The anatomy of a flat language." Australian Journal of Linguistics 3(2):143-175. find
Borer, H. 1981. "Comments on the Pro-Drop Phenomena." In Theoretical issues in the Grammar of Semitic Languages, edited by H. Borer and Y. Aoun, 127-149. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. find

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