Morphology and Markedness: On Verb Switching in Hebrew Poetry: SBL Annual Meeting 2020 Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew Seminar: Typological and Grammatical Categorization of Biblical Hebrew

Elizabeth Robar

doi:10.25159/2663-6573/9322

Authors

Elizabeth Robar Cambridge Digital Bible Research, United Kingdom

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6573/9322

Keywords:

Hebrew, tense, aspect, discourse, morphology

Abstract

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.

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