Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Lately I've been looking into the phenomenon of "resumptive" 
pronouns in 'asher clauses, the kind of the form 
"Noun - 'asher clause - preposition with pronoun whose antecedent 
is the Noun before 'asher"
e.g. HaBaYiT )a$eR Ha)iY$ BoW, "the house which the man is in 
(it)"

At first it would be easy to say Hebrew does this because the 
preposition needs something to attach to; however, there are 
profuse occurrences of combinations such as Ba)a$eR, La)a$eR, 
Me)a$eR, and of course the ubiquitous Ka)a$eR.  So I'm wondering 
why an author would sometimes choose to move the preposition 
with the 'asher, and sometimes choose not to and put the 
preposition with an anaphor instead.  Has anybody looked into this 
question?  Perhaps I should mention that I'm assuming 'asher 
clauses are derived by transformation (specifically what is called in 
English WH-movement), and am looking at the "resumptive" 
pronouns from the POV of their effect (if any) on the question of 
transformational grammar's trace theory.  Has anything been done 
on usage of these two structures?

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