Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

I've put my dissertation (not quite in final form) on the web in
compressed Adobe Acrobat PDF format at URL:

 http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/hc299dis.zip

This is 1.5 megs in size; I can e-mail it to anybody who has problems
downloading; to view it, you need an "unzip" program to uncompress it,
and the Acrobat reader which can be downloaded from the Adobe.com web
site.

Chapter 4 is on the phonological (not semantic) history of the
consecutive imperfect, and is substantially finished (but needs a
little rounding out at the end, and the inclusion of some additional
relevant references).


                          [Abstract]

              TOPICS IN TIBERIAN BIBLICAL HEBREW
                      METRICAL PHONOLOGY
                         AND PROSODICS

                       Henry Churchyard
            The University of Texas at Austin, 1999


This dissertation examines a number of linguistic issues in the phonology
of ancient Hebrew, using the extremely rich prosodic information available
in the Tiberian orthography of Biblical Hebrew.  In addition to a basic
analysis of syllabification and stress-assignment, and an examination of
the exact linguistic interpretation of the orthography, a detailed
analysis of Hebrew vowel reduction has been undertaken.  Explaining the
occurrences of reduced and unreduced vowels requires the creation of a
layer of foot-like constituents below the level of feet responsible for
stress in the usual sense.  Also, certain previously-unconsidered
linguistic patterns provide evidence that the distribution of syllable
types in Hebrew phonological representations obeys a trochaic ``Trimoraic
Law'' generalization, and that the metrical constituents governing vowel
reduction are systematically maximally trimoraic in certain contexts.

It is also shown that the Hebrew rhythm rule does not apply in a
fundamentally different way from that of rhythm rules in other languages --
though the particular nature of Hebrew metrical representations does
have certain effects on the rhythm-rule (casting some light on the nature
of rhythm rules in general).  The analyses of vowel reduction and the
rhythm rule together throw doubt on the necessity and desirability of
multiplanar metrical analyses of Hebrew (or in general).

The relationship between two distinct sources of phrasal prosodic
constituency information provided by the orthography is also examined in
detail.  The first is the system of Tiberian cantillational ``accents''
(Hebrew _t.@`aamiim_), which provides an Immediate Constituent parse
(largely prosodic in nature) for the Hebrew Bible.  The second is a set of
phonological phenomena which are sensitive to the greater prominence
connected with phonological-phrase final (or ``pausal'') position.  A
computer-assisted empirical textual-statistical study of the congruences
and discrepancies between the accentual system and such pausal phonology
was undertaken, which throws light on the linguistic nature of the
accentual system.  A number of biblical verses that show apparent
discrepancies between accentual and pausal constituency are collected and
individually discussed, and while the accentual and pausal constituency
systems are often parallel, they cannot always be fully reconciled as
variant orthographic manifestations of a single type of
linguistic/prosodic constituency.

Finally, the history of Hebrew main stress and the origins of the
consecutive imperfect stress shift are also discussed.

--
         --Henry Churchyard     churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu