Word Order in the Biblical Hebrew Finite Clause (review)

Research into Biblical Hebrew continues to emerge from its venerable philological cocoon (cozy as it was) and to incorporate productive methods and insights from contemporary linguistics. As biblical scholars grow in their cross-disciplinary knowledge and comfort levels, so too do the scope and depth of their inquiries into the structures and dynamics composing the ancient inscribed language. Adina Moshavi has made a substantial and perceptive contribution to this important trend.

The title on this book's cover is more inclusive than the monograph's actual subject matter, which gets revealed on the title page: A Syntactic and Pragmatic Analysis of Preposing. As Moshavi explains in the introductory chapter, her guiding intention is to explore contextually produced meanings of nonstandard word orders in Biblical Hebrew, specifically with regard to fronted constituents occurring in nonsubordinate finite clauses. This of course raises the question, "What is the standard word order of Biblical Hebrew?" which the author aptly seeks to address in chapter 2 ("Word-Order Markedness in Biblical Hebrew"). She provides an efficient and informative overview of previous scholarship, situating it with respect to typological and generativist linguistic approaches. Moshavi aligns herself with the predominant view that Biblical Hebrew adheres to a standard verb-subject-object order, and she hypothesizes that variations to verb-subject-object syntax must entail pragmatic significance. Efforts to clarify such significations will dominate the remainder of her project. By grounding her study of word order in markedness, Moshavi conjures an originally structuralist model of semiotic form-function interplay which sought strict and measurable values for opposition and inclusive hierarchy. Regrettably, these technical aspects of markedness have become diluted over time, and markedness terminology has been largely reduced (with the notable exception of optimality theory) to generic appellations invoked in sporadic and random manners. The author is generally aware of this deterioration, yet her presentation adheres to some dubious equivalencies, especially in defining the "unmarked" as the "basic" word order (p. 7).

Even though Moshavi recognizes the methodological risk of simply equating an unmarked value with a "statistically dominant" (i.e., more frequent) word order, she concedes that text frequency remains the most practical way for researchers to go about identifying unmarked specimens. If so, this is because higher text frequency often (though not always) merely correlates with the unmarked structure of a given opposition. But—because traditional markedness theory is deductive—it is the formal-functional configurations vis-à-vis each other (and not their attested frequencies) that most accurately delineate marked versus unmarked values. The author acknowledges that "proving that a particular order is pragmatically neutral [i.e., unmarked, and hence functionally inclusive of its marked subset] is an extremely involved procedure, requiring the identification and classification of all discourse contexts in which each word order occurs" (p. 8). Indeed, this is precisely the level of engagement that genuine markedness studies demand. To rely instead upon a text frequency diagnostic for a syntactic-pragmatic study is not an inherently invalid approach; but neither does it involve a verified theory of markedness. The mere terminology of markedness adds little of explanatory substance to Moshavi's ensuing arguments, and it would have been better avoided.

Preposed constituents are evidently signifying something in Biblical Hebrew, and Moshavi considers several possibilities in chapter 3 ("Previous Studies of the Functions of Preposing in Biblical Hebrew"). She helpfully organizes the panoply of scholarly views within three encompassing functional categories: emphasis, backgrounding / temporal-sequencing, and information structure. The "overly subjective and vague" (p. 18) concept of emphasis with respect to preposing is duly noted, along with examples of its catch-all descriptive character. Functional constructs involving foreground / background and sequentiality / nonsequentiality account plausibly for some features within Biblical Hebrew narrative texts, and yet such patterns are riddled with exceptions (pp. 29-31). As for the information structure model, Moshavi (pp. 32-46) provides crisp descriptions and incisive critiques into the bewildering array of scholarly notions concerning topic and focus, concluding that this type of approach...