Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Lee R. Martin" <lmartin AT vol.com>]

Dear Dave and Vince,
How many qatals are in the HB?
How many qatals have a named subject?
How many qatals are preceded by its subject?

Because the finite verb is inflected, the majority of verbs do not even have 
a named
subject.  Therefore, without the necessity of a named subject, it is 
impossible to
require SVO as the standard word order.  The best you can do is to say, "When 
the
subject is named, the unmarked order is SVO."  However, I do not think you 
can show
SVO to be the unmarked order in any type of literature in the HB.  It may be 
possible
to show that unmarked word order is variable.

Lee R. Martin


Dave Washburn wrote:

> 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.
>
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--

Lee R. Martin
Pastor, Prospect Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee
Instructor in Hebrew and Old Testament
Church of God Theological Seminary
http://earth.vol.com/~lmartin/