Biblical Hebrew Forum

[HarryJ_Harm AT kastanet.org]

Dear B-Hebrewers,

I must confess that accents were something I never had to learn in my 
formal Hebrew studies and since I didn't have to I didn't.

I remember that Lars Lode presented an interesting paper at the Seminar 
on Discourse LInguistics and Biblical Hebrw which was held in Dallas, 
Texas in June 1993.  HIs paper was called "A Discourse Perspective on 
the Significance of Masoretic Accents".  The paper was published in 
Biblical Hebrew and Discourse Linguistics, edited by Robert D. Bergen 
(pp. 155-172).  This book is available from SIL (International Academic 
Bookstore) and Eisenbrauns.

The summary paragraph has:

   First the main structures of Biblical Hebrew narrative paragraphs 
   and episodes are briefly presented here, and then the structure 
   and function of the Tiberian accentuation.  The end notes present 
   exhaustive data on the distribution in text and the values for 
   each marker in Genesis.  The conclusion is that all of the 
   disjunctive accents indicate prominence on levels of sentence, 
   paragraph, episode, and discourse, except for the most frequent 
   ones, Silluq, Atnach, Tifcha, Little Zaqef, and Pashta.

Sincerely,

Harry J. Harm  :{)