Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Anstey, Matthew" <MAnstey AT csu.edu.au>]

Dear friends,

 

I have several new copies left of my PhD dissertation available for purchase, 
Anstey, M. P. (2006). Towards a Functional Discourse Grammar analysis of 
Tiberian Hebrew, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. 

 

I can send Paypal invoices to anyone who wants to purchase one on credit 
card. They are USD $56, which includes postage.

 

An excerpt from the Introduction is given below.

 

Regards,

Matthew

 

Matthew Anstey
Charles Sturt University, School of Theology
ARC Postdoctoral Fellow
Lecturer, Old Testament
http://www.stmarksntc.org.au/thl/staff/default.htm

Address:
The Revd Dr Matthew Anstey
St Mark's National Theological Centre
15 Blackall St
Barton ACT 2600
AUSTRALIA

Ph: +61 (0)2 6273 1572
Fax: +61 (0)2 6273 4067
Email: manstey AT csu.edu.au

INTRODUCTION (excerpt)

My original intention was to write a dissertation that would investigate 
negation in Tiberian Hebrew (TH). The aim was to use a functional 
lin­guis­tic theory, namely, Functional Grammar, to analyze negation in TH in 
a way that was transparent to linguists (particu­larly typologists) and 
Hebraists. I set this goal so that the results of my research could be 
scrutinised and used by the general linguistic academic community. This would 
allow linguists and Hebraists to increase their knowledge of TH and FG and 
allow analysis of TH to be undertaken using contemporary theory and methods. 
Such a project, however, required building a bridge between the worlds of FG 
and TH, and this exercise in “bridge building” turned out to be a 
dissertation in itself; hence the title of the present work.[1] There were 
two main reasons for this. 

First, my previous work in using FG to analyze TH raised serious questions 
about the theory, which led to an investi­ga­tion of the history of FG 
(chapter 1; published as Anstey 2004; see also Anstey and Mackenzie 2005). 
The history concludes with an evaluation of Func­tional Discourse Grammar 
(FDG), which emerged because many others were also reconsidering FG; over 
roughly the same period of time Kees Hengeveld and then others developed FDG. 
My own proposed changes to FG … culminated in a proposed variation of FDG 
along the lines of Construction Grammar: the result is Constructional FDG 
(CFDG), chapter 2 of the present work. 

Secondly, the presentation of TH in a typologically-accessible way turned out 
to be a substantial undertaking, in no small part due to the many differences 
of opinion regarding TH and to the fact that no previous attempt has been 
made to do this comprehensively. It should be pointed out that the problem 
with TH linguistics as a discipline has not been the neglect of contemporary 
linguistics but the isolation which it suffers whenever its publications are 
only readable to Hebraists or Semitists. Only a very small proportion of 
publications on TH in the Reference List of the current dissertation are 
accessible to the general linguist or typologist. 

Since such a presentation, if done well, can function as a pro­legomenon to a 
typological reference grammar of TH (of which there is none to date), it can 
also serve as a working hypothesis for such a gram­mar, that is, as a sketch 
of the major contours of the phonology, morph­ology, semantics, and syntax of 
the language. Chapter 3 is accordingly a thorough investigation of how to 
present TH typologically, with a view to being just such a working 
hypothesis. The preparation of chapter , furthermore, raised a question 
requiring further scrutiny – how can one identify grammatical vis-à-vis 
lexical constituents in a dead language? Chapter 4 offers an original 
approach to this question by taking the prosodic and orthographic 
infor­mation of the Masoretic text as one indication of the degree of 
grammati­calisation of constituents. Although the proposed method is only one 
of several that are necessary to identify such constituents, the results are 
nevertheless in accord with those of standard modern grammars.

Thus the first four chapters prepare the ground for the sort of linguis­tic 
analysis of TH that chapter 5  provides. Chapter 5 takes the CFDG model and 
analyses data from TH to consider the problem of the multifunctionality of 
the TH qatal Verb, traditionally understood as either a Past, Perfect, or 
Perfective Verb. Although chapter 5 can not pos­sibly consider the 14,5000 
plus cases of qatal, the analysis offered demon­strates that a robust bridge 
between FG and TH can be and has been built, solving the challenging problem 
which this dissertation ad­dresses. In addition to this, innovative research 
into both TH linguistics and the theory of F(D)G has been presented. 

In the sort of interdisciplinary work that chapter 5 undertakes, there is 
usually a priority of one discipline over another. Chapter 5 is no 
excep­tion. As it has been submitted in an abridged version for a special 
edition of Linguistics that considers developments in FDG, the intended 
readership is for functional linguists. Thus in the version in this 
dissertation, some minor changes have been made to make it more acces­sible 
to Hebraists.

 

                                                                              
                                                                              
              

 

 

This dissertation has been published or submitted as a series of five major 
papers as follows:

 

Chapter 1. Anstey, Matthew P. (2004). Functional Grammar from its inception. 
In A New Architecture for Functional Grammar, J. Lachlan Mackenzie and María 
de los Ángeles Gómez-González (eds.), 23–71. Berlin/New York: Mouton de 
Gruyter.

Chapter 2 (abridged). Anstey, Matthew P. (fc). Functional Discourse Grammar – 
Multifunctional Problems and Constructional Solutions. Linguistics.

Chapter 3. Anstey, Matthew P. (2005). Towards a typological presentation of 
Tiberian Hebrew. Hebrew Studies 46, 71-128.

Chapter 4. Anstey, Matthew P. (2006). The grammatical-lexical cline in 
Tiberian Hebrew. Journal of Semitic Studies 51(1), 59-84.

Chapter 5 (abridged). Anstey, Matthew P. (under review). The Tiberian Hebrew 
qatal Verb: Multifunctionality and Constructional Functional Dis­course 
Grammar. Linguistics.

 

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[1] And hence a functional study of negation remains to be done, Snyman’s 
() Minimalist account notwithstanding.