Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Peter,
> Dear Rolf, Dave etc,
> 
> Do you appreciate an Old Master by first examining every brush stroke?

A good point, but in order to appreciate a painting I need to know 
some things about color, representation of objects, etc.  It also 
depends on what I'm trying to do with the painting: if I'm just 
looking at it and saying "that's nice" or "that's awful" (which is 
actually about where I am with art :-(  then I don't really care about 
the brush strokes etc.  However, if I'm looking at it with a view to 
understanding what he was doing, then yes, I'm likely to get down 
to that level because I can't fully understand his technique or why 
he used what he did without doing so.

> Do you enjoy music only after first analysing every note?

Well, in my case, as a former music theory & composition major, 
yes.  In a broader sense, though, to really enjoy it I need to know 
something about music phrases, form, timbres of various 
instruments and how they go together, compositional and 
performance technique, melodic contour, harmonic rhythm and root 
movement, harmonic vs. nonharmonic tones, you name it.  Again, 
the real question is "what am I trying to accomplish when I listen 
to/examine this work?"

> Do you really understand real utterances in your own language, say 
> what your family members say to you, on a word-by-word basis?

Sometimes not even then ;-)  The difference, of course, is that the 
language they speak is also my native language and I've already 
coded the intuitions about the rules it uses to generate clauses 
into my brain cells.  We don't have anybody like that with BH, so 
we have to work backwards from the written texts - which may or 
may not represent actual spoken Hebrew - and that means we 
start from the ground up, as it were.  Words, inflections, clauses, 
then on to the bigger parts, because this seems to be how the 
human mind builds language competence (at least from a 
generative point of view).  My goal is to find the rules for BH that 
generated all and only the grammatical sentences in the language.  
I don't think that we can analyze the larger discourse units properly 
unless and until we understand the generating and filtering system 
that excluded nongrammatical clauses from the native speaker's 
mental grammar.  I would quibble with Rolf a tiny bit about starting 
absolutely at the word level, though of course there's a lot of 
interplay between the word level and the clause level and each can 
and does inform the other.  However, until we have a firm handle on 
those levels, IMO discourse jumps the gun a little.  It may be 
possible for discourse to inform both clause and word-level 
understanding, but I still see discourse working from a more 
structural/descriptive POV rather than a generative one.  Structural 
grammars are by nature overly complex and rather disunified, 
whereas generative grammars seek ultimate simplicity and unity of 
usage based on the (internal) rules that do the generating.  Once 
we have those, we can look at how variously-generated clauses are 
put together into larger discourse units and used creatively; I don't 
know how a generative approach would do the reverse.

> I don't have time or competence to attempt a proper answer to your 
> arguments, but I am quite convinced that you are both wrong! One 
> important piece of evidence is that we usually disambiguate homonyms 
> in our own languages quite automatically from the context. 

Usually the clause-level context...

There is of 
> course a case for clause-based and word-based analysis, but the 
> meaning of a word cannot be determined apart from the clause it is 
> part of, and the meaning of a clause cannot be determined apart from 
> the discourse it is part of. 

I disagree with both.  If I say "it's cloudy today" nobody needs a 
larger discourse unit to understand what I mean.  If I say "my 
daughter just got home from school" ditto.  My oldest daughter has 
a friend who likes to walk around saying "Cow, cow, cow."  I don't 
need a clause to understand the meaning of the word.  
*Sometimes* we need a larger clause context to know the meaning 
of a word, but that is usually because of homonymic or other 
considerations, which are not part of the base level of grammatical 
analysis (or generation).  The two examples you gave with the 
present and past tenses of "read" are just such a situation, yet 
even that only happens in the written language; in the spoken 
language they are easily distinguishable so that a larger context 
isn't needed to separate them.  In fact, I can use the imperative 
form absolutely: I tell my daughter, "Read!"  And she doesn't need 
a clause to figure out what I mean.  She grabs her book.  It seems 
to me that the patterns you describe are based on the exceptions 
rather than on the rule.

So to start with the clause grammar, or 
> even worse the word grammar, is what is like reading the mystery novel 
> from the wrong end or like appreciating art by brush strokes.

For the reasons above, I can't agree.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.