searching for asyndeton in Hebrew

[syardney]

Does anyone know of a way to search for asyndetic clauses in Hebrew? I imagine there's a way to do it, but I'm not having any luck figuring it out.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Will monitor and hopefully someone will have an answer for you shortly. If not, I'll see what I can dig up.

[c. stirling bartholomew]

If my memory serves, this has been asked before and the answer was something like: asyndeton in Hebrew is not represented by a tag because the language model used for syntax in the tagged syntax module doesn't consider a missing conjunction a grammatical constituent. I am not explaining this well. But the absence of something is not easy to represent with a tag in the database. Also, the syntax and grammatical tagging follows a particular model of syntax analysis which considers asyndeton a figure of speech.

 

One suggestion that might help is reading what ever you can find on Hebrew Parallelism in Biblical Poetry. Certainly Parallelism with and without conjunctions should be discussed in any respectable scholarly treatment of  Hebrew Parallelism.

 

A text I am currently reading has examples of what might be considered Polysyndeton. This is again not considered under syntax because the use of the repeated conjunction doesn't violate any syntax rules. It is regular syntax which gives a sort of punctuated emphasis in oral presentation. 

 

Is. 27:1 (NRSV)   On that day the LORD with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent [and] Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.

 

בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא יִפְקֹד יְהוָה בְּחַרְבוֹ הַקָּשָׁה וְהַגְּדוֹלָה וְהַחֲזָקָה עַל לִוְיָתָן נָחָשׁ בָּרִחַ וְעַל לִוְיָתָן נָחָשׁ עֲקַלָּתוֹן וְהָרַג אֶת־הַתַּנִּין אֲשֶׁר בַּיָּם ס

Edited July 14, 2023 by c. stirling bartholomew

[Robert Holmstedt]

The answer has nothing to do with the language model used for the syntax tagging. (Actually, our model takes "null" constituents quite seriously.) The simple answer is that the lack of a conjunction is not represented in the morphological text and since there is no visible item to search for, it is mostly impossible to find without simply hunting the old fashioned way. I probably used the syntax databases more than most people and as the creator of one of them I freely admit that they all have limitations. Great tools, but not a panacea. 

 

Cynthia Miller (-Naudé) addresses some cases of the lack of waw between poetic lines in her 2007 essay Constraints on Elllipsis in Biblical Hebrew, pp. 165-180 in the Gene Gragg Festschrift (which, I believe, can be freely downloaded from what used to be called the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago).

[c. stirling bartholomew]

AI BOT:

 

Quote

 

In Chomskyan syntax, null constituents refer to syntactic elements that do not have phonetic realization. These can include subjects, objects, complements, and other syntactic categories.

Tagging null constituents involves assigning a syntactic category to these elements, despite their lack of phonetic content. This is typically accomplished through the use of special symbols or labels in a parse tree or other syntactic representation.

In some cases, null constituents may be marked with a null morpheme or other marker to indicate their syntactic role. However, in many cases, the absence of any overt marking or realization means that the null constituent must be identified and tagged through other means, such as by analyzing its context and relationship to other syntactic elements in the sentence.

Overall, the tagging of null constituents is an important task in Chomskyan syntax analysis, as it enables researchers to accurately and systematically describe and analyze the structure of sentences and other linguistic forms.

 

 

Edited July 19, 2023 by c. stirling bartholomew

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I'm not seeing it now, so I guess we took care of it.

[Robert Holmstedt]

In response to the AI bot:

I agree. A close reading of my comment, or anywhere else I have explained this on the forum over the years, would recognize that my syntax does tag many null constituents, such as subjects, verbs, and objects, as well as resumptive anaphors.

Conjunctions are a different matter, and the AI bot seems to recognize this by the absence of any mention in the AI description.

 

AI=1, Human = 1, tie game.

 

Edited July 20, 2023 by Robert Holmstedt