Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

Title: RE: Hebrew Syntax.

Rolf, thank you for rubbishing discourse analysis more thoroughly than Waltke and O’Connor ever did.

 

I agree that discourse analysis is not an easy field and there is danger of subjectivity. But it cannot be ignored. It is well known that in some languages there are words and morphemes whose functions can be understood properly only from a level higher than the sentence level, i.e. they are discourse particles etc. In other languages there are more complex syntactic features which have similar discourse level functions.

 

It is the proposal of some scholars of biblical Hebrew that the choice between verb forms (which is not well understood by traditional methods, as is shown by the sharp disagreement between yourself and the majority of scholars including W&O’C concerning WAYYIQTOL) is determined (in part) by discourse level factors. And there is good evidence for this hypothesis, although no one would claim that it answers all the questions. If you disagree with this hypothesis, please give evidence against it rather than ruling it illegitimate.

 

Peter Kirk

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Rolf Furuli [mailto:furuli AT online.no]
Sent: 10 April 2002 15:27
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: RE: Hebrew Syntax.

 

Dear Peter (and Rodney),

 

<snip>

 

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