Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <abuian AT access4less.net>]

At the risk of treading all over a good joke . . .

C. Stirling Bartholomew wrote:
> Waltke/O'Connor page 601 36.2.1.a
>
> "The infinitive construct can represent very nominal part of a clause."
>
> The way I read this statement, an infinitive construct can fill any
> syntactical slot in a clause which a noun can fill. Is that what W/Oc are
> saying?
>
> If that is the case then an infinitive construct can fill the slot of a noun
> in the construct state or in the absolute state. What does one call an
> infinitive construct when it fills the slot of a noun in the absolute state?

I wonder if this isn't a confusion of categories. Construct state and 
absolute state are morphological conditions, while "nominal part of a 
clause" suggests to me a syntactic issue. Syntactically speaking, what 
we normally think of as a construct chain is simply a type of noun 
phrase. It fills a nominal slot in the clause. So the syntactic question 
is not whether a word is construct or absolute in form, but how the word 
is functioning. Part of the confusion is that we talk about a noun being 
in construct to another noun, but this only works one way. We don't talk 
similarly about a noun being in absolute. The fact is, the role that we 
think of the absolute noun playing in a construct chain has nothing to 
do with the noun being absolute, because it can just as easily be 
another noun in construct, so that the chain extends.

In short, then, I'd say it's a non-issue, because we have no more 
occasion to talk syntactically about an infinitive construct in the 
absolute state than about a noun in the absolute state. That is only a 
relevant feature of nouns when we are talking about morphology.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics