Anaphora in Biblical Hebrew: A Generative Perspective

“Theoretical Approaches to Anaphora and Pronouns in Biblical Hebrew”: Papers forming part of the 2017 SBL Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew Seminar (Boston, USA)

Abstract

Anaphora, that is, backwards-referring relations, are well-known in language and include such common items as a variety of pro-forms (it, that, myself, each other) and even adverbs (so). Lesser studied are forward-referring relations, i.e., cataphora. Biblical Hebrew utilises a variety of anaphoric relations, though it lacks a true reflexive anaphor. This study will introduce the investigation of anaphora from a generative syntactic perspective, then proceed to a survey of the features of Biblical Hebrew anaphora, and finally conclude with a discussion of anaphoric complexities that require future attention.