Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Matthew Anstey" <manstey AT portal.ca>]

Gday Henry, Vince

Since I don't quite understand some of your points I have a few questions.
First for Henry:
>
>As for the linguistic basis of pausal/non-pausal alternations, the
>basic factor is that pausal forms (at the end of major prosodic/
>syntactic constituents) had a greater degree of stress.  Most pausal
>phonological changes fall under two phenomena, vowel-lengthing and
>blocking of stress-movement.  Here vowel-lengthing is a very natural
>consequence of greater stress, and in my dissertation I discuss how
>stress-shift blocking is also a natural result of a greater degree of
>stress being placed on a word.

Henry, assuming you're right, what motivates the user/writer/massorete to
add the stress. I imagine most languages pronounce the same words
differently in different contexts, but that not many mark this
morphologically. What occurred to cause someone to mark the stressed words
morphologically? Surely there is not a 100% correlation between the
morphology and pronunciation of the MT, so why is just one set of words
marked differently? If it *just* to mark stress are we to assume that no
other non-pausal forms are stressed? Perhaps I am misunderstanding this,
since I have no formal training in phonology or morphology.

>
>Here Richard Gowerwitz is oversimplifies little too much when he
>states that "major pausal phonology" (i.e. stress-shift blocking, if
>relevant, and also vowel lengthening, or vowel quality change) is
>conditioned by major disjunctive accents, while "minor pausal
>phonology" (i.e. stress-shift blocking alone) is conditioned by minor
>disjunctive accents.  In my dissertation, I explore how the accentual
>system correlates with "minor pausal phonology" (stress-shift
>blocking) in detail (my dissertation is available in compressed Adobe
>Acrobat PDF format at http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/hc599dis.zip
>warning: 1.5 MB file, somewhat theoretical), and it can be seen how
>such stress alternations arose from prosodic patterns which could
>naturally occur in speech, though they're a little fossilized in
>Masoretic.

So a natural language user would produce these stress alterations? Is that
what you mean?

>However this doesn't necessarily mean that such patterns
>necessarily go back in Hebrew to the Old Testament times (though I
>argue for an early origin for the consecutive imperfect stress
>alternation in chapter 4 of my dissertation).

So if I understand you correctly, at some stage when BH was still spoken,
users would naturally stress certain words? If this is what you are saying,
then can you inform me of how accurate are the correlations between
"prosodic patterns which could
>naturally occur in speech" and the MT?  Thanks.

Now for Vince:

>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.

I know next-to-nothing about generative phonology which is what I think you
use, but are you saying, I think like Henry, that "natural prosodic
phenomena" can predict with a fair degree of accuracy the locations of the
stresses in the MT? If this is so, then who do you think were the people
with this ability, were they native BH speakers, from which period?
Secondly, do your principles also predict other stresses in the Hebrew that
are *not* marked in the MT morphology? (Do you use any deletion-rules to
eliminate these?) More importantly for my interests, what do you think are
the syntactic and/or semantic and/or pragmatic  reasons that produce the
"natural prosodic phenomena"? Or is it all just the way things were said?
Again, if I have misunderstood what you're saying just let me know.

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

What does this mean exactly? In a GB-grammar framework do you then see the
'deep' forms all in pause with the 'surface' forms mostly phonologically
transformed? Is that what you mean?

>
>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...

Doesn't this strengthen your theory however? Wouldn't pausal forms take
precedence over an accentual system?

When you say "right-edges" I assume you mean in spoken sounds, not in
orthographic marks? (Sorry if I have the lingo all messed up!).

Thanks for your thoughts.

With regards,
Matthew