hinneh and Mirativity in Biblical Hebrew

This exhaustive study of hinneh modifies the findings of an earlier pilot study of the lexeme. Three major categories of use are distinguished, namely, 1) when hinneh within in a speech situation points out an entity, location, or event to an addressee; 2) when a narrator (and less often a speaker) uses hinneh to point to the cognitive effects of an observation or mental consideration upon another character (or, less often, upon the speaker him-/herself); and 3) when hinneh points to a proposition (or propositions) which need(s) to be related to another proposition (or propositions) or speech act(s). In each of the three categories hinneh has a deictic function, which could be regarded as its semantic core. However, since in about two-thirds of the occurrences in the corpus, it is unambiguously clear that hinneh is used to point to something for which either addressees or characters were not prepared, it is postulated the most typical and central use of hinneh is to mark mirativity. However, some secondary shifts away from this core mirative sense have been identified in the corpus. Each of the shifts is to be accounted for in a principled manner.