The Grammatical-Lexical Cline in Tiberian Hebrew
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Charles Sturt University, Canberra
The present paper considers how prosodic analysis can assist in the investigation of the status of Tiberian Hebrew (TH) constituents with respect to their position on the grammatical-lexical cline. The introduction presents one area of research where such an analysis is necessary, namely, the presentation of TH in a typological format. The first section summarizes such a format, presented in detail in Anstey (2005). The second section then demonstrates how the Masoretic diacritics, as encoded in the Westminster Hebrew Morphology Database 4.0 (Groves et al. 2003), can be interpreted as an indication of the degree of morphophonological fusion of constituents, which is one variable affecting diagnosis of grammaticalization vis-à-vis lexicalization. Constituents are divided into three ranges of fusion and candidates for grammatical constituents are suggested. Based on this analysis, suggestions are provided for a more fine-grained subdivision of TH parts-of-speech. The conclusion suggests areas for further research.