Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Final Clause.

AuthorPat-El, Na' Ama
PositionBook review

Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Final Clause. By ADINA MOSHAV1. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic. vol. 4. Winona Lake, hid.: EISEN-BRAUNS, 2010. Pp. xvii + 204. $42.50.

Sentential word order (WO) is one of the most studied topics in linguistic typology and generally in syntax. Languages are often categorized according to the order of their constituents in the sentence and this order is said to be correlated with the order in lower dyads (e.g., N-Adj., N-Rel., etc.). The WO of Biblical Hebrew (BH) has also been studied almost ad nauseam. While the WO of Biblical Hebrew is widely agreed by most Hebraists to be VSO (verb-subject-object), this has lately been disputed. Essentially, the major questions are what counts as a "basic sentence" and what forms fall under V. Way-yiqtol forms are mostly restricted to the head of the sentences, hence are V-first, but therefore are considered in some approaches to be non-indicative and out of consideration. Thus, the drastically different answers to these questions depend on what scholars count as relevant evidence and what theoretical framework they choose to employ. Like most Hebraists, Adina Moshavi accepts VSO as the basic WO of BH. In the book under review, she examines from a pragmatic approach what conditions variations of the basic WO of non-subordinated verbal sentences in Biblical Hebrew. One can only admire her for taking on such a literature-rich and theory-heavy topic and producing such a clear and smooth reading.

The book contains nine chapters and a conclusion. The first four chapters outline the methodology and review the literature; the original contribution of the work is organized in chapters 5-9. Chapter I outlines the goal of the work as well as the corpus (Genesis-2 Kings). Chapter 2 engages with the various approaches to basic WO. Here she brings up the concept "marked/unmarked," which is essential to the following discussion. Moshavi takes the generative arguments for SVO head-on and meticulously explains where they fail. Although her discussion is illuminating. I doubt that any generative linguist will find it convincing, since the theory dictates that every language has an underlying SVO WO. The rest of the book is essentially a categorization and explanation of orders which deviate from the basic VSO (primarily SVO and other types where a constituent is preposed to the verb). The idea is that the basic WO is used in a neutral setting and has a broad contextual...

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