Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

> Karl,
> If we do speak in terms of VSO or SVO etc., all that matters is statistics.
> Statistically, Hebrew is VSO. It would be perfectly legitimate to
> doubt that languages are to be categorised as "VSO", or that
> statistics are relevant, but then the entire concept is gone and we
> have to take a totally different method of describing syntax.
> We could.
> What we can *not* do however, is to say that "Hebrew can be both VSO
> and SVO" or something like that, given the statistics that are simply
> there.

But we could argue that verbal clauses are V-S and verbless clauses are 
S-Pred. See:

Buth, Randall. "Word Order in the Verbless Clause: A 
Generative-Functional Approach." Pages 79-108 in The Verbless Clause in 
Biblical Hebrew: Linguistic Approaches. Edited by Cynthia L. Miller. 
Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic 1. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 
1999.

Perhaps the competing motivations of the two different clause types were 
resolved in the direction of the verbless S-Pred as in later Hebrew. The 
competition would certainly have become greater as the participle was 
allowed a position in the verbal paradigm as a present tense.

Nevertheless, although the VS(O) view of the verbal clauses is by far 
the majority view, others do hold to SV(O) as the unmarked order in the 
verbal clause:

DeCaen, Vincent. "On the Placement and Interpretation of the Verb in 
Standard Biblical Hebrew Prose." PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1995.

Givón, T. "The Drift from VSO to SVO in Biblical Hebrew: The Pragmatics 
of Tense-Aspect." Pages 181-254 in Mechanisms of Syntactic Change. 
Edited by C. N. Li. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977.

Holmstedt, Robert D. "The Relative Clause in Biblical Hebrew: A 
Linguistic Analysis." PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002.

Holmstedt, Robert D. "Word Order and Information Structure in Proverbs." 
MS, 2003.

Joüon, Paul. Grammaire de l'Hébreu biblique. Rome: Pontificio Istituto 
Biblico, 1923.

Now I don't necessarily agree, only that the issue is more complex than 
simply one of statistics. The view that BH is VS(O) is often simply 
*assumed* by most (as Holmstedt reveals) rather than argued for.




> Of course Hebrew allows for variation, but what we have to look at is
> when this variation happens (in prose that is). It doesn't happen at
> random. I am convinced that word order in prose is quite relevant to
> syntax.
> What did of course happen is that in later stages of Hebrew the
> language turned into SVO, so that modern Hebrew is SVO.
> Best regards,
> herman


Regards,
David Kummerow.