The Biblical Hebrew transitivity alternation in cognitive linguistic perspective

About this book

That there exists a group of biblical Hebrew verbs which appear in both transitive and intransitive grammatical constructions has long been recognized. However, explanations of this phenomenon among modern BH grammarians, especially regarding the grammatical status of the Object, have been unsatisfactorily vague. Many issues relevant to the BH transitivity alternation (e.g. valency, transitivity, lability, verb classes, and constructional semantics) have received sustained treatment in the broader linguistic community. The purpose of this dissertation is to offer an extended treatment of the BH transitivity alternation utilizing the theory and methods of Cognitive Grammar and the related (sub)discipline Construction Grammar. This investigation explains the relationship of these BH verbs to their associated nouns with reference to the prototypical and schematic transitive event. Many BH verbs which permit the transitivity alternation exhibit significant semantic overlap allowing them to be categorized and analyzed as "verb classes." The benefit of analyzing verbs by class is that it increases the amount of data (an important feature when working with a dead language) and, more importantly, it enables the isolation of common lexical qualities that contribute to a verb's ability to appear in alternate constructions. The BH verb classes analyzed are: Verbs of Dressing and Undressing, Verbs of Dwelling, and Verbs of Fullness and Want. After a consideration of BH verb classes, the same methods are applied to a selection of miscellaneous BH verbs which also exhibit the transitivity alternation. This study concludes that the BH transitivity alternation is licensed and limited by conceptual factors. Though often translated and interpreted as essentially synonymous expressions, verbs exhibiting the transitivity alternation actually offer alternate construals of the realities they represent and therefore should be regarded as having different meanings. It is argued that the meaning of these BH verbs must be established on the basis of the unique combination of verbal and constructional (or syntactic) semantics. Both transitive and intransitive constructions construe verbal meaning in accordance with certain conventionalized image schemas. Such construal is based, at least in part, on the imagination, goals, and intentions of the speaker.