A negative polarity item (NPI) is a word or expression that occurs grammatically in negative clauses and a variety of other types of clauses such as interrogatives and conditionals, but not in ordinary affirmative sentences. Examples from classical Biblical Hebrew include the pronoun מאומה “anything” and the semantically-bleached noun דבר “a thing,” which has been produced from the ordinary noun דבר “word, matter, action” by the process of grammaticalization. This paper examines the noun דבר in the non-biblical DSS with the purpose of determining whether it is used as there as an NPI, as in Biblical Hebrew, or as an ordinary semantically-bleached noun, as in Rabbinic Hebrew. The results show that the diachronic development of דבר in the DSS appears to be at an earlier stage than classical Biblical Hebrew, despite the later dating of the scrolls. This finding is explained as a special kind of pseudo-classicism.
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A negative polarity item (NPI) is a word or expression that occurs grammatically in negative clauses and a variety of other types of clauses such as interrogatives and conditionals, but not in ordinary affirmative sentences. Examples from classical Biblical Hebrew include the pronoun מאומה “anything” and the semantically-bleached noun דבר “a thing,” which has been produced from the ordinary noun דבר “word, matter, action” by the process of grammaticalization. This paper examines the noun דבר in the non-biblical DSS with the purpose of determining whether it is used as there as an NPI, as in Biblical Hebrew, or as an ordinary semantically-bleached noun, as in Rabbinic Hebrew. The results show that the diachronic development of דבר in the DSS appears to be at an earlier stage than classical Biblical Hebrew, despite the later dating of the scrolls. This finding is explained as a special kind of pseudo-classicism.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 453 | 184 | 16 |
Full Text Views | 100 | 4 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 160 | 11 | 0 |