Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dr Dale M Wheeler <dalemw AT multnomah.edu>]

Peter Kirk wrote:


> I'm confused. I can find no reference to Gross in my electronic copy of this
> grammar, except in the acknowledgement and the references. Is my copy
> incomplete? Is it missing footnotes in which Gross is referred to?

Here's the footnote in Ch 7 where they refer to Gross..but as I said, they 
don't give ANY of his data, etc., to help the reader decide if their 
decision is correct.

**************
58 Many of the views put forward here are based on the results of a major 
research project on the function of BH word order conducted by Walter Gross 
at the University of Tübingen. Some of these findings have been published, 
cf. Gross (1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1991, 1993a, 1993b and 1996). However, this 
grammar is by no means an exhaustive representation of the views of Gross. 
It also does not represent an uncritical acceptance of his linguistic terms 
of reference and research findings, for example, the term fronting is 
preferred to his term topicalization, His more nuanced distinctions of 
constituents, referred to as syntagms, are also not used.
***************

> The text
> as I have it certainly doesn't opt for SVO; it implies VSO, without actually
> stating this, by treating as marked and classifying all variations from VSO.

No wonder I have been scratchin' my head trying to figure out what they are 
saying...you're absolutely correct, for after having (apparently) discarded 
the prime reasons that grammars have always claimed VSO for Hebrew, they 
make a passing comment towards the end of the chapter (when speaking about 
discourse issues), to wit:

*****************
Across languages, utterances with predicate focus are those that are the 
most unmarked as far as the sequence of clause constituents is concerned, 
e.g. in English it is the sequence subject-verb-object (SVO) and in BH and 
Arabic it is verb-subject-object (VSO).
****************

So after beginning with the claim that all other grammars have used the 
wrong reasons (viz., waw-prefixed verbs and pronounless verbs starting 
sentences) to come to the VSO conclusion, they then come to *exactly* the 
same conclusion, but they call it "PreVerbal Field" and "Main (ie., verb + 
everything else) Field".  So what was the point of implying that VSO was 
wrong, but then following a VSO approach, but just using different 
terminology??  And linguistics wonder why people get frustrated with their 
introduction of whole new sets of terminology...

At any rate...thanks Peter...my headache is beginning clear up...


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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
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