EXTRAPOSITION AND PRONOMINAL AGREEMENT IN SEMITIC LANGUAGES By GEOFFREY ALLAN KHAN Submitted for the degree of PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. ProQuest Number: 10673220 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10673220 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 - 2 - ABSTRACT This thesis is a study of extraposition and pronominal agreement in Semitic languages. By the term 'extraposition* I understand the syntactic construction in which a noun or nominal phrase stands isolated at the front of the clause without any formal connection to the predication. The grammatical relation of the nominal is usually indicated vicariously by means of a co-referential resumptive pronoun, e.g. (Arabic) Zaydun *abu-hu tajirun "Zayd - his father is a merchant”. 'Pronominal agreement' is a construction where a noun or nominal phrase whose grammatical rela.tion is indicated by its case inflection or by an adjoining relational particle is accompanied in the same clause by a co-referential pronoun agreeing with it in number, gender, person, and grammatical relation, e.g. (syriac) le-malka qatl-eh "The king - he killed him”. Each chapter constitutes an independent study of extraposition and pronominal agreement in a separate Semitic language. These languages include Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, Akkadian, and Amharic. A single chapter is also devoted to the two Aramaic dialects Biblical Aramaic and Syriac. Both the structure and the function of the constructions are examined. The study of the structure consists of a taxonomy of the various structural types which are attested in the language. The function of the constructions is elucidated by examining their r6le within the discourse in which they occur. These independent studies are followed by a concluding synthesis which explores the possibilities of Semitic comparative syntax. - 3 - CONTENTS Preface ........ p. 4 Introduction p. 5 Chapter 1. ARABIC p. 55 Chapter 2. BIBLICAL HEBREW p. 151 Chapter 5. ARAMAIC: Chapter 5a. BIBLICAL ARAMAIC ................ p. 191 Chapter 5b. SYRIAC ........................ p. 215 Chapter 4. AKKADIAN.................................. p. 254 Chapter 5- AMHARIC ................................... p. 538 Comparative Semitic Syntax ............................ p. 578 Bibliography .......................................... P* 396 - 4 - PREFACE The transliteration systems which have been adopted are self-explanatory and there is no need to provide an inventory of their symbols. Morpheme boundaries within a single word unit, such as those between a prefixed definite article and a noun or between a noun or verb and a suffixed pronoun, are not indicated by a hyphen. In Arabic, final long vowels are transcribed as short when they are followed by a word beginning with a cluster of two consonants, e.g. fi Ibayti. Cuneiform logograms are transcribed with their Akkadian values, unless these are unknown, in which case they are transcribed with their Sumerian reading. Occasionally recourse is had to referential indices to indicate the co-referentiality of two elements in a clause, e.g. John^ broke his^ arm where John = his; John, broke his^ arm where John ^ his. Translations are kept as literal as possible so that the reader can see clearly how I am interpreting the syntax, in order to save space the chapters on Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic make frequent reference to passages in the Old Testament without reproducing these in the text. I should like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. A. K» Irvine, and to Professor J. Wansbrough for devoting many hours of their precious time to reading and discussing the preliminary draft of the thesis. I am indebted also to Professor E. Ullendorff for guiding me in the early stages, I also wish to thank Dr. 0- Wright, Miss J. Firbank, Mr, D. Hawkins, Dr. D. Appleyard, Dr. M. Weitzman, Dr. M. Geller, Professor G. Goldenberg, and Professor J. Blau for giving me many helpful comments on some of my ideas. Finally, words are unable to convey my gratitude to my wife, Colette, who typed the thesis and without whose constant positiveness and encouragement I should never have completed it. - 5 - INTRODUCTION This thesis is a study of extraposition and pronominal agreement in Semitic languages. By the term ‘extraposition’ I understand the syntactic construction in which a noun or nominal phrase stands isolated at the front of a clause without any immediate formal connection to the predication. The initial ’extraposed' nominal is not adjoined to any relational particle such as a preposition or an object marker and in those languages which have case inflection it is generally in the nominative. The grammatical relation of the nominal in the predication is usually indicated vicariously by means of a co-referential resumptive pronoun, e.g.;- (Arabic) zaydun darabtu-hu "Zayd - I hit him". 1 zaydun abu-hu tajirun "Zayd - his father is a merchant" There are a few examples attested of extrapositional constructions in which the extraposed nominal stands at the end rather than at the front of the clause, e.g.:- (Arabic) ,i5a hiya Sakisatun ’absaru llaSina kafaru ("Behold they are looking upwards - the eyes of those who disbelieve". Q21/97)* Since, however, such constructions occur only very rarely in Semitic languages they have been largely excluded from consideration. - 6 - 'Pronominal agreement* is a construction where a noun or nominal phrase whose grammatical relation is indicated by its case inflection or by an adjoining relational particle is accompanied in the same clause by a co-referential pronoun agreeing with it in number, gender, person, and grammatical relation. Unlike extraposed nominals, nominals which are accompanied by such 'agreement pronouns' are not restricted to initial position but may occur anywhere in the clause - the front, the interior, or the end. Agreement pronouns, therefore, may be either resumptive or anticipatory, e.g.:- (Syriac) le-malka qatl-eh 'The king, h e . killed him qatl-eh le-malka "He. killed him. the king, 0 11 Pronominal agreement constructions in which the 'agreed with' nominal occurs at the front of the clause are closely allied to extraposition. Many Semitists treat extraposition and pronominal agreement with a clause initial nominal as variants of the same basic 5 construction. Such a classification is valid if the criterion of the taxonomy is function, since in many cases these two construction types are functionally equivalent 4 In this thesis, however, the two constructions are kept distinct and designated with different terms. The justification for this is as follows:- Two basic features of my methodology are (a) that a clear dichotomy is drawn between the structure of a syntactic construction on the one hand and its function on the other, and (b) that structure is the starting point of the analysis, i.e. my aim is to seek the function which is performed by a given structure rather - 7 - than the structure which performs a given function. This last methodological point is not trivial since the relation between structure and function in language is usually not one to one hut rather many to many (cf. Green 1980). Consequently, in order for the field of inquiry to he well circumscribed one must start with a single structure (or a group of closely related structures) and seek its several, and often very diverse, functions or else start with a single delimited function and seek its various exponent structures. I have decided to make a group of closely related syntactic structures my departure point. The reason for this is simply that the existence of the structures in question has been widely recognised by Semitic philologists but their functions have remained poorly understood, it follows that the syntactic constructions which I wish to make my starting point must at the outset be classified qua structure and labelled according to this structural classification. Clauses such as (Syriac) le-malka qatl-eh and qatl-eh le-malka are therefore regarded as variants of a single basic structure (pronominal Agreement) which is distinct from, though closely related to, the structure of extraposition. The crucial point of differentiation is that in pronominal agreement the nominal stands immediately inside the predication whereas in extraposition the nominal is structurally isolated from the predication and is integrated within it vicariously by the co-referential pronoun. The fact that the two Syriac clause types given above may have different functions or that the first may be functionally equivalent with extrapositional clauses has no bearing on the choice of terms with which these structures are designated. - 8 - The thesis consists of five chapters, each one of which is devoted to a separate Semitic language. The chapters constitute a series of independent studies of Extraposition (henceforth Ex) and Pronominal Agreement (henceforth PA) in each language with the minimum of cross-linguistic comparisons. These independent studies are followed by a concluding synthesis that explores ways in which comparative Semitic syntax can be undertaken and the results it can yield. For the most part the synthesis is based on the data which have been presented in the preceding chapters, in some cases, however, reference is made to Semitic languages which have not been dealt with. Three criteria were taken into account when deciding which languages to select for detailed treatment. Firstly the selection had to be representative of the entire Semitic language area.