Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

On Thursday 29 May 2003 10:27, c stirling bartholomew wrote:
> on 5/28/03 11:21 AM, Dr Dale M Wheeler wrote:
> > 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??
>
> I agree. This is a mistaken notion which plagues a lot of discussions of
> Hellenistic Greek. If a constituent isn't required to make a well formed
> clause then it is wrong headed to reserve a slot for that constituent when
> it is absent.

Agreed.  The main reason for these phantom slots or "traces" as they're 
called 
in the literature, is to work out mathematical formulations that make the 
"pure" linguists happy.

> And like others who have contributed to this thread, I am suspicious of the
> whole notion of "fronting" because it presupposes a standard constituent
> order. The whole SVO/VSO  kind of discussion proceeds as if there is a
> default constituent order and we just need to determine what it is. Might
> be more useful to drop the assumption that Hebrew has a standard word order
> and find a different way of forming the question.

Ooooooookay, so how would you formulate the question (whatever it may 
actually 
be)?  We know that languages have base (not "standard") constituent orders. 
Japanese, for example, is object-subject-verb.  Both English and Portuguese 
(at least the Brazilian flavor, the only one I'm familiar with) have a base 
constituent order of subject-verb-object.  English forms a question by 
reversing the subject and verb (often with a "helping verb"), whereas 
Portuguese forms a question purely by voice inflection while retaining the 
SVO constituent order.  There has to be an explanation for this; the best one 
is that English "fronts" the verb in order to form a question.  Generally 
speaking, the simplest (least inflected) form of the verb is found in a 
language's base constituent order; hence both English and Spanish lean toward 
a SVO order when using the basic present tense.  The question at hand is, 
what is the base constituent order of Hebrew?  Constituent movement is a fact 
of language; the question is, does Hebrew move the verb to the front when 
creating a so-called waw-consecutive clause, or does it front the subject 
when creating a qatal/yiqtol clause?  If you have a better way of formulating 
that question, go for it.

> on 5/28/03 3:30 PM, Liz Fried wrote:
> >> (3) Liz: you don't know **anyone** who does Hebrew and Chomsky ... ??
> >> ;-)
> >
> > IT's *very* Chomskyian.
> >
> > Liz
>
> And it is middle or late Chomsky, not Chomsky '59,'65 which a lot of
> vintage generative syntax theory is based on. I read Liz's paper and
> concluded that I don't understand Chomsky very well.

Any more, nobody does.  Several years ago I had some correspondence with one 
of Chomsky's prize students from the early days, Ray Jackendoff (who at that 
time was teaching at Brandeis).  He told me in so many words that he found 
Chomsky's later theories incomprehensible.  I have to agree, which is why I 
stick with the older pre-trace "Extended Standard Theory" (nothing like 
self-aggrandizing terminology!) in my own approach.  Your Mileage (and 
Vince's!) May Vary.

-- 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur