Clause Combining in Semitic: The Circumstantial Clause and Beyond

419 Pages·2015·2.969 MB·English

by  Bo Isaksson, Maria Persson

AbHAnDlunGen für Die KunDe
Des MorGenlAnDes
band 96
Clause Combining in semitic:
The Circumstantial Clause and beyond
edited by
bo isaksson and Maria Persson
Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft
Harrassowitz Verlag
© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7
AbHAndlungen für die Kunde
des MorgenlAndes
im Auftrag der deutschen Morgenländischen gesellschaft
herausgegeben von florian C. reiter
band 96
board of Advisers:
Christian bauer (berlin)
desmond durkin-Meisterernst (berlin)
lutz edzard (oslo/erlangen)
Jürgen Hanneder (Marburg)
Herrmann Jungraithmayr (Marburg)
Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz (bern)
Jens Peter laut (göttingen)
Joachim friedrich Quack (Heidelberg)
Michael streck (leipzig)
2015
.
Harrassowitz Verlag Wiesbaden
© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7
Clause Combining in semitic:
The Circumstantial Clause and beyond
edited by
bo isaksson and Maria Persson
2015
.
Harrassowitz Verlag Wiesbaden
© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7
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© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7
Contents
Editors’ preface ............................................................................................ 7
Clause Combining in Arabic dialects
Heléne Kammensjö
Circumstantial Clause Linking in Egyptian Arabic Narration ..................... 15
Maria Persson
Non-main Clause Combining in Damascene Arabic:
A scale of markedness .................................................................................. 55
Clause Combining in Written Arabic
Michal Marmorstein
The Domain of Verbal Circumstantial Clauses in Classical Arabic............. 125
Clause Combining in Biblical Hebrew
Bo Isaksson
The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew. A Clause Combining Approach ... 169
Clause Combining in Modern Spoken Aramaic
Eran Cohen
Circumstantial Clause Combining in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect
of Zakho ....................................................................................................... 271
Clause Combining in Epigraphic South Arabian
Jan Retsö
The Problem of Circumstantial Clause Combining (CCC) in Sabaean ........ 297
Clause Combining in East Semitic
Eran Cohen
Circumstantial Clause Combining in Old Babylonian Akkadian ................. 365
Index of terms ............................................................................................. 407
© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7
© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7
Editors’ preface
We became aware of the role played by ‘clause combining’ while reading the
ground-breaking book Clause combining in grammar and discourse (1988).1
In the chapter “The structure of discourse and ‘subordination’” Matthiessen
and Thompson discuss how “clause combining is a grammaticization of the
rhetorical discourse”. They state that clause combining reflects the rhetorical
intentions of the author or narrator, and that “the interesting cross-linguistic
issue is how and to what extent the grammar of clause-combining in a given
language reflects the rhetorical organization of discourse in that language”.2
Discovering the importance of ‘clause combining’ in Semitic texts was one of
the major achievements of the research project Circumstantial Qualifiers in
Semitic: The Case of Arabic and Hebrew,3 which preceded and paved the way
for the research presented in this volume.
Clause Combining in Semitic: The Circumstantial Clause and Beyond ex-
amines how different kinds of clauses combine to a text in a number of Semit-
ic languages. Specifically, many of its chapters examine how circumstantial
clauses are coded in individual Semitic languages.4
The book comprises the results of a research project, Circumstantial
Clause Combining in Semitic, funded by the Swedish Research Council. As is
nearly commonplace in research projects, considerations regarding the most
‘useful’ or ‘fruitful’ or ‘productive’ terminology resulted, for some of us, in a
more general conceptual approach. The term ‘circumstantial’ in the project
title was originally a reflex of the phenomenon of ḥāl (‘circumstance’) clauses

1 Haiman, John, and Sandra A. Thompson, eds., Clause combining in grammar and
discourse (Typological studies in language 18. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benja-
mins, 1988).
2 Matthiessen, Christian, and Sandra A. Thompson, “The structure of discourse and ‘sub-
ordination’”, in Clause combining in grammar and discourse, 299, 317.
3 Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 70 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009).
4 We could also have chosen ‘clause linking’ for the title of the book as the terms are used
interchangeably. ‘Clause linking’ was used by R. M. W. Dixon in his chapter “The se-
mantics of clause linking in typological perspective”, in The semantics of clause linking:
A cross-linguistic typology (edited by R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, 1-
55, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). However, ‘clause combining’ inspires us to
imagine how a creator of a text (oral or written) actively combines clauses to achieve a
specific communicative efficiency.
© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7
8 Editors’ preface

in Arabic. But it was soon felt that ‘circumstantial’ was too narrow a concept
to cover the complexity of the phenomena we wanted to investigate. As an
example, it was questioned whether a clause that expresses an elaboration (of
the action in a previous clause) could justly be called ‘circumstantial’.5 Thus,
the general scope of the project had to be widened to an investigation of non-
main clause linking in Semitic. This was done with some limitations, though.
We did not primarily study relative clauses, nor subject and object clauses
(occupying the subject or object ‘slot’ in a main clause).6 Clauses introduced
by subordinating conjunctions were left out as well, since the linking of them
is made semantically explicit by the conjunction.
The questions put forward in the project were: How is hypotaxis marked in
Semitic, other than by conjunctions? How does this affect the organization of
texts? More specifically, what constitutes a circumstantial clause? To find an
answer to these questions, all the major Semitic language families and some
modern spoken Semitic dialects were covered within the project.7
The Semitic varieties were chosen with the aim to cover a wide range of
the Semitic linguistic spectrum. We were also aiming, as far as possible, for
varieties that are, or have been at some point in time, the native tongues of
their users, and to capture them in that time and function. In other words, our
goal was, wherever possible, to analyse texts which represent a native compe-
tence of the language users. Thus, for the classical Hebrew texts, for example,
the ambition was to choose texts that were so early that they may be assumed
to represent a living language (though possibly belonging to a higher register).
Kammensjö describes types of circumstantial clause linking in a corpus of
spoken Egyptian Arabic narratives. Asyndetic hypotactic linking was found to
be more than twice as common as syndetic hypotactic linking in Kammensjö’s

5 Thus M. Waltisberg, Satzkomplex und Funktion: Syndese und Asyndese im Althochara-
bischen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), who calls such a clause ‘Umstandssatz’
(213). Cf. Bo Isaksson’s review of Waltisberg’s book in Zeitschrift der Deutschen mor-
genländischen Gesellschaft 164 no. 1 (2014): 247-251.
6 Thus also the limitation in Dixon’s “The semantics of clause linking in typological
perspective”, 1, cf. note above.
7 For Ethio-Semitic we refer to Lutz Edzard, “Complex predicates and Circumstantial
Clause Combining (CCC): Serial verbs and converbs in a comparative Semitic perspec-
tive”, in Strategies of Clause Linking in Semitic Languages: Proceedings of the Interna-
tional Symposium on Clause Linking in Semitic Languages 5-7 August 2012 in Kivik,
Sweden, edited by Bo Isaksson and Maria Persson (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014,
207-230).
© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7
Editors’ preface 9

data. She concludes that EA circumstantial clauses are usually subtly marked,
most often through interlacing (sharing semantic elements) and gram switch-
ing (verb form contrasts). This means that EA circumstantial clauses are, in
general, ‘unmarked’ for semantic relationships, such as temporality or cau-
sality, which have to be inferred from the context. Kammensjö also points to
the pivotal role of the active participle in the EA verbal system in general and
the area of circumstantial clause combining in particular.
Persson concludes, from her analysis of Damascene Arabic, that there are
no syntactic grounds for the establishment of a class of “circumstantial claus-
es” on a par with, for example, “conditional clauses” and “relative clauses”.
She finds only one clause type which combines form and function to such an
extent that it can be said to be used specifically to encode a circumstantial
meaning. Rather, she points to the discovery of gram switching which consti-
tutes an overarching system of minimally marked non-main clause linking
within which the clause combinations subsumed under headings such as “cir-
cumstantial” or “ḥāl” constitute an integrated part.
Marmorstein uses a large body of Classical Arabic prose, composed or
compiled by the end of the 10th century A.D to discuss the whole semanto-
syntactic domain of event integration and complex predications to which
verbal circumstantial clauses belong. She discusses the entire range of com-
plex predications: from closely integrated (and grammaticalized) verbal com-
plexes, via syndetic circumstantial clauses, to textual units consisting of mu-
tually-dependent, setting and presentative clauses. She concludes that these
constructions, despite the apparent heterogeneity of the group, are intrinsically
related by the presence of the same set of predicative verbal forms: yafʿalu,
the participle and qad faʿala, marking an ongoing situation, a state and an
outcome, respectively. All three are co-temporal, either simultaneous or coin-
cidental with the time frame set in the matrix clause. Her survey also sheds
new light on the use of the Arabic verb forms as such in the classical texts she
surveys.
Isaksson examines the use of the three basic finite verbal grammatical
morphemes (grams) in Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) and archaic Hebrew
poetry: the suffix verb (Vsuff), the short prefix verb (VprefS) and the long
prefix verb (VprefL), and how they behave in clause combining. The starting
point of his survey is that the verbal system can only fully be understood
when seen in the light of how clauses are linked together. Isaksson demon-
strates, with numerous examples, how the discourse function of a digression
© 2015, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden
ISBN Print: 978-3-447-10405-0 ISBN E-Book: 978-3-447-19049-7