Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Peter wrote:
> Would you care to justify the following, Dave? What is your evidence 
> that wayyiqtol is "clearly a transformed-and-moved constituent"?

It'll take a fair amount of bandwidth if I go into all of it.  Before I do, 
I'd refer you to my 1994 paper.

> Surely our recent discussions have led towards the conclusion that the 
> basic unmarked sentence structures are verb-initial with wayyiqtol or 
> weqatal, and that other orders are marked. 

I missed a lot of the recent discussions because some hacker had 
too much free time and decided to kill my provider's system for 
about a month.  However, I'd be interested in a Reader's Digest 
version of just how this conclusion was reached.  I'd also be 
interested in seeing evidence to show that this conclusion 
generalizes across the whole language and not just the fairly small 
and specialized corpus that we possess.  I'm talking evidence 
other than statistics.

Indeed I suspect that the 
> key to use of X-qatal instead of wayyiqtol (or X-yiqtol in place of 
> weqatal) is some form of fronting for focus of the X component - the 
> verb becomes non-focused and so background.

That's a discourse evaluation, not a syntactic one, so we're getting 
into the question of different levels of analysis again.  Syntactically, 
it only makes sense to begin with the most basic form of the verb, 
which is the qatal.  All other forms, including those with W-, are 
made by adding something to it, so if we want to discover the 
"basic" word order in Hebrew we will want to start with the qatal 
and see if we can discover what "normal" word order is in clauses 
using it.  I think it's safe to say that SVO is the general order of the 
day in such clauses.  At this level, markedness (whether in 
narrative, poetry or whatever) really has little or nothing to do with it.

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