Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

henry,

following up on work by revell in the 1980s on pause, by goerwitz 1993
phd, and dresher Language 1994, we were able to assemble a hypothesis
of a bottom-up, prosodic projection of pausal environments from
syntactic edges. this has been tested and confirmed.

the important point is that most words do not have more than one
prosodic form, relatively rare in fact to have two let alone three.
but to the extent pausal forms show up where predicted, we can also
say where they ought to appear if they could: these are "pausal
environments".

it was further predicted that a mismatch between bottom-up pause and
top-down cantillation would follow from the variation in length of
verse. it was further predicted that the pausal environments would
fall on certain accents as a function of average length of verse.

it was predicted that the relation of our pausal environment to the
accents should be identical to your statistical findings: as it turns
out, couldn't ask for a better match!! i think this is the sort of
confirmation that we needed, and apparently have.

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