Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT sil.org]

I still see a problem with $MX here that we are trying to force this 
verb/adjective into categories taken from traditional grammar of 
Indo-European languages, i.e. transitive or intransitive, as well as 
verb/participle or adjective. Instead we need to look at the whole 
issue of "valency" of this and other verbs in a more general way, and 
distinguish between grammatical cases and semantic roles. Now I am not 
an expert at this, so perhaps someone can correct me. But as  I 
understand it the "valency" of a verb is a description of which nouns 
or noun phrases can be associated with it, which grammatical cases 
and/or prepositions/postpositions are used with these noun phrases, 
and what semantic roles these noun phrases play. In some languages 
these valency rules are quite strict. In others, including b-hebrew, 
they seem to be quite flexible, although there may be subtle rules not 
immediately obvious. Also in b-hebrew there are no true grammatical 
cases, and so this part of the rule is irrelevant.

On the basis of this model I see $MX (in the Qal - the valency rules 
differ in different stems) as a stative verb, with a participle form 
$FM"AX acting as an adjective. The valency of this verb is apparently 
that it requires a (semantic) agent (subject) with no preposition, and 
there is an optional (semantic) patient (or ??) with the preposition 
b- or `al. Additionally, at least in 1 Kings 1:40, there seems to be a 
further optional semantic role describing the quality of the action, 
in which the noun has no preposition. Is this a reasonable desrciption 
of the situation?

Peter Kirk