Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Vincent DeCaen <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>]

matthew,

here at u of toronto there're at least four of us working intensively
on tiberian phonology, both segmental and prosodic. we're progressing
nicely to solid theories in many areas. (revell's now retired to
oxford, uk.)

dresher and revell both have seminal papers on the nature and
distribution of pause/accents that are the basis of our studies. the
conclusion is that the accent parsing and the distribution of pause
are natural prosodic phenomena that in principle can be generated for
hebrew verses. pause is generated at right edges of intonational
phrases, much like in other languages (right now i'm looking at zulu
pausal forms with the same behaviour). it wouldn't appear in the
consonantal text.

in my derivations, pausal forms are basic and full; contextual forms
are derived and reduced (that is, the opposite of received wisdom).

two further notes.
what has been called major pause appeared to be occurring if both in
pause and on D0 accents (athnah and silluq). dresher has been studying
verses without athnah and their properties, and has found major pause
there as well, occurring on the same right edges, but in this case
necessarily on D1's (zaqef or tiphah). that was quite an eye-opener:
we lose the generalization on pause-accent correlations, but still...

also, re consonantal text. ever notice in the earlier materials the
striking pattern

long/nonpast    YQWM    YQWMW           YQYM    YQYMW
short/modal     YQM     YQMW            YQM     YQMW
consec          WYQM    WYQMW           WYQM    WYQMW

not 100%, but close enough to warrant investigation.

pax tecum
V
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dr Vincent DeCaen     <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>
c/o Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, 4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor
University of Toronto, Toronto ON, CANADA, M5S 1A1

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative, www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/hsei/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The mind takes to a new idea the way the body takes to microbe:
It rejects it.  --P.D. Medawar