The intersection of syntax and poetry in the first Hebrew acrostic poem of Lamentations 1

What it is about

The authors ask whether the alphabetic acrostic of Lamentations 1 (each strophe opening with the next letter) and its parallelism forced the poet into unnatural syntax. They classify the 33 lines of Lam 1:1–11 (half-lines divided by the Masoretic accents) into items that must stand first (the exclamative אֵיכָה), ordinary verb-first and verbless order, marked orders (topicalisation, left dislocation), and unusual orders (subject extraposed to the end of the line, after a prepositional phrase). Many topicalisations sit inside a strophe, where the acrostic cannot be the cause, and in one case the unmarked verb would have started with the same letter anyway. Conclusion: one grammar serves prose and poetry; poetry compresses by dropping recoverable subjects, leaving relatives unmarked, leaving the role of a noun phrase to inference, and starting quotes without a frame. A side note explains why the waw strophe is hard: word-initial w became y early, so almost no Hebrew word begins with a consonantal ו.

Ideas

• I1. Run the converter's rules unchanged on the Torah's poems (Gen 49, Ex 15, Num 23–24, Deut 32–33) and compare its error rate there with prose, against PTNK where it covers them; the paper predicts the same rules hold, with more ellipsis.
• I2. Half-lines from the accents: split a poetic verse at its main disjunctive (atnaḥ, or ʿoleh weyored in the poetic system) and treat a subject at the end of the second half-line after a PP as extraposed (attach as nsubj, flag Extraposed=Yes in MISC).
• I3. Quotes without a frame: in poetry a change of speaker can come with no וַיֹּאמֶר; prag should allow a quote to open on a person shift (1st person after 3rd) alone, as a separate, measured rule.
• I4. Count word-initial non-conjunctive ו in the Torah (expected only a handful: וָו "peg" in Ex 26–27, וָלָד Gen 11:30, a few names) as an illustration of the w > y shift.

For Mova

I1 is a measure for tools/macula reported in 13. Biblical Hebrew in Mova: the tools; I2 belongs to 02-cantillation.md (accents as syntax, poetic system) and 08-syntax.md (dislocation, extraposition). I3 is a candidate rule in tools/macula/src/prag.rs (speech without frame) for 09-discourse.md. I4 is a count for 03-phonology.md (historical sound changes) and 01-script.md.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5842/67-1-1011

@inproceedings{naude2023intersection,
  title = {{The intersection of syntax and poetry in the first Hebrew acrostic poem of Lamentations 1}},
  author = {Naudé, Jacobus A. and Miller-Naudé, Cynthia L.},
  booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.5842/67-1-1011},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5842/67-1-1011}
}

References

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