Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Vincent DeCaen <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>]

the more I look at the participants against various grammatical
tracking, syntax, pronominalization, etc, the more I think that this
is a very fruitful attack on a prose textgrammar, moreso than looking
at verb forms alone. I think there's an excellent dissertation hiding
here for someone who wants to make a major contribution to textgrammar
and discourse analysis.

here's the kind of question I want answered. why is the full
appearance of Hannah and Elqanah significant in some environments,
redundant but obligatory in others? what is the relation between
syntax and pronouns? discourse structure and pronouns?

some thoughts. what if discourse were represented as macrosyntactic
trees, with sentences as terminal nodes of a hierarchical structure?
then certain relations among nodes would hold systematically. what if
certain configurations were barriers to pronoun coindexing? then the
full form would have to appear, even though not textgrammatically
significant. that would be nice if someone could show it.

what if the position of pronouns in a clause were distinctive? what if
coindexing demanded a certain syntax, otherwise a relation couldn't
hold? what if there were different behaviour syntactically for a
pronoun tracking a major discourse participant vs not?

Kirk Lowery did a dissertation that involved pronouns and discourse.
hey kirk, how does your work interact with the musings above?
seem to remember the notion of a matrix of discourse features
proposed, instead of the one-dimensional verb hierarchies. I still
think that's the right way to see things.

cheers
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Vincent DeCaen, Ph.D.  <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~decaen/hsei/intro.html
c/o Deparment of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations
4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor, University of Toronto, Toronto ON, M5S 1A1
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The world needs open hearts and open minds, and it is not through
rigid systems, whether old or new, that these can be derived.
--Bertrand Russell