Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - RE: [b-hebrew] VSO vs SVO

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Dr Dale M Wheeler <dalemw AT multnomah.edu>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] VSO vs SVO
  • Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 11:21:13 -0700

First of all, thanks Peter for the info.

Secondly, yes I was referring to Van der Merwe's Grammar. They base their decision to opt for SVO on the work of Walter Gross (inter alia: Die Satzteilfolge im althebräischen Verbalsatz: Untersucht an den Bücher Dtn. Ri und 2Kön, 1996).

Thirdly, to the heart of the matter...

A couple of things trouble me, based on doing some very quick Gramcord research on this.

1. Gross, et.al., rely heavily on the supposition that the Waw in front (fronting, or choose your own preferred linguistic philosophy term) of Waw-Consecutives and Waw Conversive (fill in your own terminology) are "fronting" the verbs, thus shoving them into the second slot, which they deem to be their natural position anyway.

2. Their second supposition is that since Hebrew doesn't need a separate personal pronoun subject, the Verb ends up becoming the first element (constituent, choose your own linguistic term) in the sentence, but in a Hebrew mind the personal pronoun is actually there, and so the subject is still conceptually first, and the verb second.

3.a. Now what troubles me are the assumptions involved in these two criteria, esp., as they relate to how a Hebrew speaker actually would view the syntax of his own native language. I'm not so sure that a Hebrew speaker would "feel" like the Waw prefixed to a Perfect, Imperfect, etc., is actually occupying a separate slot, fronting the verb. Hebrew has a habit of putting all kinds of things first in sentence which may or may not be messing with the word order, eg., the Interrogative Particle, the Negative Adverbs. And their habit of combining words into one "word" seems to me to more than just "contraction" (eg., I'm, can't, won't, etc.). Thus, I'm not convinced that a universal linguistic theory about sentence structure can be applied to Hebrew in this way. Moreover, isn't it pretty much accepted linguistic theory that conjunctions connect clauses/sentences, and thus should not be considered as occupying a slot at the beginning of a sentence or clause anyway?

3.b. And I seriously question whether a language without the need for pronouns, nevertheless reserves a phantom slot for them. This *certainly* is not true for Koine Greek! But if the prefixed Waw is occupying a "slot" and the pronoun is occupying the second "phantom" slot, doesn't that mean that the verb is normally in the *third* slot??

4. Even though I have not seen Gross' work first hand (and van der Merwe's doesn't include any actual data), I suspect that part of Gross' and van der Merwe's questioning of the normal VSO word order for Hebrew is based on the following type of statistics:

The Unprefixed Perfect and Imperfect occur @7000x.
@25x the Personal Pronoun Subject immediately follows the unprefixed Perfect or Imperfect verb.
@890x the Personal Pronoun Subject immediately precedes the unprefixed Perfect or Imperfect verb.

The Waw Prefixed Perfect, Imperfect, and Consecutive forms occur @12,100x.
@60x the Personal Pronoun Subject of the verb immediately follows it.
Since there is no "slot" room between the Waw and the Verb, the Personal Pronoun Subject never precedes the verb.

5.a. But, the situation is a bit different when a Noun subject is involved:

64x the Noun Subject is the initial word in verse and precedes the Impf or Perf Verb, with no preceding conjunction or preposition attached to the Noun Subject.

111x the Noun Subject FOLLOWS immediately after Impf or Perf verb, which is the initial word in the sentence and has no Waw Prefixed:

5.b. It should also be noted that Ps 77:18; Isa 14:11; Lam 1:15 has order: V-O-S, and that 16x (Deut 4:33; Job 4:2; Job 6:5; Job 8:11; Job 36:19; Job 39:9; Job 40:28; Prov 6:27; Isai 49:15; Jere 2:11; Jere 2:32; Jere 15:12; Ezek 22:14; Amos 3:4; 5; Mala 3:8) the Interrogative Particle is prefixed to the verb (these are not listed in the 111x).

5.c. It should further be noted that there are about 90 examples where the Noun Object or Adverbial Accusative, with or without a prepositional or )ET- prefix, or the Subject, preceded by )ET-, a conjunction, negative adverb, etc., precede the verb.

6. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that we are slicing into the history of a language which is moving from an inflectional language to a distributional language, and that transition seems certain to be moving Hebrew from a more flexible word order language to a more rigid word order language.

Thots...???


**************************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Research Prof., Biblical Languages Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street Portland, OR 97220
V: 503-251-6416 F:503-251-6478 E: dalemw AT multnomah.edu
**************************************************************************





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page