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Fronting and exhaustive exclusion in Biblical Hebrew


Christo H.J. van der Merwe

Abstract

Biblical Hebrew scholars struggle to account for about one third of instances of fronting in the Hebrew Bible in terms of a coherent semantic-pragmatic model. I hypothesize that considering fronting as a construction (i.e. a form-meaning pair) that could encode various semantic-pragmatic functions, including “exhaustive exclusion”, could be one of the solutions to this challenge.

Keywords: Focus, fronting, exhaustive exclusion, information structure, exhaustive inclusion, negation, topic


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eISSN: 2223-9936
print ISSN: 1027-3417