Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew

Call For Papers: The Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew section solicits papers for four joint sessions. The first session (co-sponsored with Biblical Hebrew Poetry) is entitled “Linguistic Features of Biblical Hebrew Poetry.” This session will examine the question of whether poetry and prose in the Hebrew Bible have different linguistic features, what those features are and how they should be described. At one end of the spectrum are scholars who believe that prose and poetry are distinct linguistic systems; at the other end of the spectrum are scholars who believe that prose and poetry comprise one linguistic system. We are also interested in analyses that account for (give reasons for) the linguistic variation and/or differences between prose and poetry. The second session (co-sponsored with NAPH) is entitled “Mitigation and Intensification in Biblical Hebrew.” Research in pragmatics and discourse studies have shown that speakers make use of a rich variety of mitigating and intensifying strategies in order to heighten the effectiveness of the conversational interaction. This session will explore mitigating and intensifying devices in Biblical Hebrew, including, for example, restrictive adverbs, modal expressions, deictic shifts, negative polarity items, rhetorical and conducive questions, conditionals, and oaths. The third session (co-sponsored with NAPH) is entitled “Interrupted Syntactic Structures.” This session will explore various syntactic phenomena that “interrupt” the sentence syntax including vocatives and terms of address, parenthetical remarks, sentence fragments, “scrambling” and ellipsis. The fourth session (co-sponsored with NAPH) is non-thematic and entitled “Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew.” Papers that address the study of Biblical Hebrew using a well-articulated linguistic method are welcome, and those that apply linguistics to particular Biblical Hebrew texts are especially encouraged.

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