Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryan Rocine" <596547 AT ican.net>]

Welcome back, Vince!  I see you must be doing your 'spring-thing' in Jonah
again.  Is it really spring?!

you wrote:
> (1) 1sam1:12,  W:HFYFH K.IY HIR:B.:TFH L:HITP.AL."L ...
> all commentaries, etc, say, read wayhi for wehayah. no less authority
> than GKC insists on reading it so, and the confusion could be explained
> with the old hebrew script. but... I don't want to mess with the text,
> especially since there are other instances (6 or 7 in samuel?).
> what do you discourse guys do with this? do you modify the text to fit a
> given theory, or does your theory have to respect the text?
> 
> (2) Jonah v.2. L"K: ..... W.Q:RF) .....
> seems to me based on my experience of standard hebrew that you might
> expect weqara'ta, that is a sequential, rather than uqra' the plain
> imperative. what does a discourse grammar do? do we say that the two
> forms would mean something different: weqara'ta vs. uqra'? or do we say
> that jonah represents a later dialect without weqatal? etc?
> what does your method tell you? is there only one dialect and so one
> discourse grammar? are there many dialects, each with its own grammar?
> what?

of course the following is simplified, e-mail-style.  It's a starting point
perhaps.

wehayah is obviously rare.   What do we know about rare structures in
story-telling?  (1) Writer/scribes do make mistakes.  (2)
Cross-culturally/linguistically, good story-tellers do unusual
things at important points in stories.

  So let's look at all such occurences of a particular structure, in this
case wehayah (or maybe even any weqatal which looks like it should be a
wayyiqtol).  If they display (in the words of Revell) a self-consistency,
the probability that they are mistakes decreases, and the probability that
they are functional goes up.  In short, we will have to see if there is
consistency in the pragmatics of the situations in which the form in
question appears.  We will wonder if the distribution correlates with a
narrative phenomenon which is attested cross-culturally/linguistically. 
Our conclusions are about as good as our definitions of the situation and
the structure's function within said situation.

Re dialect, register, and writer/discourse variation:  Given the
circumstances surrounding the generation of the HB, we expect to find
dialect and register. We also expect to find discourse rules do vary from
piece to piece.  On this second point: the higher the element we are
examining(e.g. discourse is higher than sentence, sentence is higher than
clause, clause than phrase, etc.), the less rigid becomes the syntagmatic
relationship between lower and higher levels.  For example, we only expect
a fairly limited, rigidly controlled variation in the morpho-syntax of
preposition constructions.  One expects to find a much braoder range of
variation within discourse constructions.  For example, one large,
well-developed discourse may have different macro-syntactic signs than
another, like  Genesis, for instance, which is divided by the toledot
formula.  We don't  expect the toledot formula to be used in other books. 
It is a macro-syntactic sign in Genesis piece only.  What we can bring with
us from Genesis to other texts is a suspicion that the Hebrew writer may
use formulaic sentences to divide a large text.

I think most discourse research is working with a corpus that it feels is
pretty uniform.  It's basically the Revell/Miller corpus.  Be that as it
may, as long as the pragmatics related to a particular structure are
consistent within a corpus, it seems to me that we should think about
enlarging the corpus.  When, on the other hand, the correlations between
structure and function are low, we should think about justified ways to
restrict the corpus until the correlations rise, i.e. start to describe the
ways in which groups of Hebrew discourses are similar and different.

that help?

Shalom,
Bryan



B. M. Rocine
Associate Pastor
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13208

315-437-6744(w)
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