Clause Structure Variation in Biblical Hebrew: A Quantitative Approach

What it is about

The full text is not in our library, and the repository page gives no abstract text, so this card rests on the title, the catalogue record (249 pages; keywords Biblical Hebrew, syntax, machine learning, statistics). From the title and keywords, the thesis studies how the order and make-up of clause constituents (subject, object, complements, explicit vs. pronominal elements) vary across the books of the Hebrew Bible, using the ETCBC database and statistical and machine-learning models to separate what is due to period, genre, and text tradition. Ideas below are provisional until the text is read.

Ideas

I1. Treat constituent order as a measured variable: for every finite clause in our Torah trees, record the order of verb, subject (nsubj) and object (obj) and whether each is a noun, a pronoun or a suffix; tabulate by book and by voice (narrator vs. character, from macula prag).
I2. Fit a simple, explainable model (logistic regression or a decision table) predicting VS vs SV from a few features (verb form, clause type, subject definiteness, speech vs narration); report which features carry the weight, rather than a black-box classifier.

For Mova

I1 is a count over the trees for Syntax: the clause and the sentence (word order) and 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md (stage profiles). I2 belongs with the prag measurements in 13-mova-tools.md; it should use the narrator/character split that tools/macula/src/prag.rs already computes. Re-read and revise this card when the thesis PDF is in the library.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{naaijer2020clause,
  title = {{Clause Structure Variation in Biblical Hebrew: A Quantitative Approach}},
  author = {Naaijer, Martijn},
  booktitle = {Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)},
  year = {2020},
  url = {https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/clause-structure-variation-in-biblical-hebrew-a-quantitative-appr/}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2020-naaijer-clause-structure-variation-biblical-hebrew/