Marked word order in the book of Joel (original) (raw)
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Journal For the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2010
In his 2004 Brunel Ph.D. thesis, Lunn employs pragmatics, more specifically the theory of information structure, in order to account for the large number of defamiliarised clauses (non-canonical word order) found in Hebrew poetry. Deriving from the linguistic tradition of Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), Lunn embarks on a long-awaited study. He is not aware, though, that on the other side of the Atlantic, in a similar theoretical context, S.L. Fariss approached the question of word order in Hebrew poetry producing prima facie opposite results. 1 One cannot wait to see how these two works will get along together. Lunn praises Knud Lambrecht's theory of information as a more refined one and criticises Rosenbaum and Walter Gross for preferring a more traditional approach (pp. 255-273). He also argues that none of them was able to differentiate objectively between variation, which is purely poetic and that which is pragmatically marked. Although restricted to a particular group of texts or samples, none of the afore-mentioned authors attempted a more integrated analysis of the phenomena. Hence, Lunn prefers an extended database to accommodate many texts from Hebrew poetry and his interpretation of the data is very detailed and tabular. Exactly in this lies the deficiency of Lunn's method, because the texts in his database are too varied in terms of genre and date, and this is a matter that he never addresses. Lunn noticed that Hebrew poetry displays a higher degree of deviation from the regular VSO word order than BH prose. Lunn's database included 1190 verbal clauses from Hebrew prose and 1243 verbal clauses from Hebrew poetry, with a higher percentage of verbal clauses in Hebrew poetry preferring a marked word order (34 per cent)
The Relation of Coordination to Verb Gapping in Biblical Poetry
This essay examines the relationship between two features of biblical poetry: (1) verb gapping between lines with matching structures (i.e. identical constituents); and (2) explicit coordination of parallel lines with waw. At first glance, the presence of an explicit conjunction between such cola may appear to be optional and completely within the realm of stylistics, even though it is statistically most frequent. However, a correlation of the precise structural features of elliptical structures with the presence (and absence) of coordination suggests instead that additional syntactic and cognitive factors are at work.
“Double Segmentation” in Biblical Hebrew Poetry and the Poetic Cantillation System*
ZDMG, 2018
The principle of double segmentation is at work in Biblical Hebrew poetry in spite of the structural parallelism: both syntactic and poetic segmentations are evident, giving place to dynamic discrepancies between these two levels. In order to illustrate this claim I turned to the poetic system of cantillation of Three books examined for the selected Psalms corpus. I claimed that the poetic system of cantillation manifests poetic prosody, sensitive to the poetic segmentation: (1) there are two patterns of versification for couplets and for triplets; (2) there are explicit prosodic rules that set a poetic line as a long conjunctive sequence marked by a monotonous pitch contour and an a-semantic boundary pause, namely as a prosodic unit on its own. However, the cantillation system of Three books is also responsive to the syntactic segmentation: (1) the patterns of doubles and triplets can be sporadically used for pragmatically marked constituents, glossing, pivot phrase, and in order to avoid heavy enjambments; (2) the system is not uniform processing too long poetic units, apparently due to their complex syntactic structure; (3) if the syntax strongly contradicts the versification, the cantillation system would rather follow the syntactic segmentation.
Morphology and Markedness: On Verb Switching in Hebrew Poetry
Journal for Semitics, 2022
Historically, grammarians have viewed tenses as simple, unanalysable pieces of grammatical information. Portmanteau tenses may combine tense, aspect, and modality, but these are the main categories. Suzanne Fleischman has proposed a radically new paradigm in which not only verbal forms but entire discourse contexts are analysed as clusters of oppositional properties to which markedness values apply. It is in the interaction of the cluster of properties associated with a verbal form and those associated with its discourse context that we find the locus of verbal meaning. This interactive meaning is illustrated by examples from Psalm 18, demonstrating that morphological forms have the effect of either drawing non-prototypical situations closer to the prototype or drawing situations farther away from the prototype.
Semantic Ordering of Lexical Choices in Poetry : Implications for Literary Translation
2010
The (un)translatability of poetry from one language to another has been a long debate over the centuries. The difficulty of the task can be traced back to the special nature of poetic discourse. What distinguishes poetic from non-poetic text is the fact that poetry represents meaning by special arrangement and interplay of its linguistic elements which is defined as texture (Hasan, 1985). But what is of great importance is the way in which the texture of a poem affects the texture of the reader‟s mind and creates aesthetic effect. Among several factors which have to be taken into account in the choice of suitable equivalent in translation, this study investigates the semantic and lexicogrammatical pattterns essential to the creation of texture by adopting chain interaction model developed by Hasan(1985,1990). This paper will analyze a poetic text to demonstrate the way in which semantic organization of lexical choices affects the way language is processed and consequently produces t...
Clause Syntax in the Song of Songs: A Preliminary Study
The thesis of this project is that the clause functions as the constitutive linguistic unit in the Song of Songs in lieu of parallelism or other rhetorical devices. First, clause boundaries are compared with cola boundaries to demonstrate that clause syntax should receive priority over parallelism or other rhetorical devices. These stylistic elements exist as the author’s selective use of the language system, but they do not precede or supersede that system. Second, the study analyzes clause occurrence and distribution to show how the clause provides meaning as the text’s basic unit. Rather than treating the book with a different technique from prose, the investigation analyzes clause use as a normal function of the language system. The method ascribed to by this work is textlinguistic and computer-assisted. The textlinguistic approach facilitates building a model of clause functions from the raw data. The computer-assisted approach allows the data to be produced efficiently and consistently. The data provided by the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer serves as the basis for the analysis.
Word Order of Noun and Verb Phrases in Contemporary Persian and English Poems
JOURNAL OF ADVANCES IN LINGUISTICS, 2017
Literature is a system of semantic markerswhich convey emotions as well. Sentences in literary texts, particularly poetic ones, are not merely a medium to convey a message. In literary language, there is not a one to one correspondence between words and their meaning. That is in literary texts, the words and consequently sentences do not have their common dictionary meaning. Rather, in many cases, they include the writer's or poet's intended meaning. For writers and poets, words are not simply means of conveying a message, but a scheme to create beauty and novel innovations. The poets to make more impression on their addressees usually create uncommon sentences in the language. To express their feelings and thoughts, they invert the poem's internal word order or sort out the structural system of their poetic sentences counter to standard language. By creating "marked" words or sentences, they actually seek to communicate their audience artistically and innovatively. "Sentence" is the poets' main instrument that according to traditional grammar's definition consists of two parts: subject and predicate. However, in modern linguistics "sentence" is a set of noun and verb phrases that are joined together as a harmonious whole. Each of noun or verb phrases has a unique structure so that their internal order cannot be changed; however, poets make their utterance poetic by inverting these groups to create greater influence.
Syntactic Aspects of Poetry: A Pragmatic Perspective
The language of poetry is different from the language of other literary genres. That is to say, the grammar of poetry is different. This refers to the fact that the rules of grammars will have to be modified so as to permit certain "liberties" or "licenses" on the one hand, and to account for the novel kinds of restrictions that are imposed on linguistic units in poetry both within and beyond the sentence, on the other. Such grammar would reveal, by a comparison with the grammar of the ordinary language, many differences between poetic language, the ordinary language and any literary genre. Therefore, literature particularly poetry cannot be examined apart from language. Accordingly, poetry cannot be grasped without a thorough knowledge of grammar.