The semantic potential of 'al in Genesis, Psalms, and Chronicles

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:This thesis offers a description of the semantic potential of the Biblical Hebrew lexeme '7l! inGenesis, Psalms, and Chronicles according to a cognitive linguistic perspective. This specificlinguistic approach offers a theoretical framework of how humans cognitively organizelexical meaning, which is advantageous for highly polysemous lexemes, such as '7lJ. The needfor this study arises because existing Biblical Hebrew resources do not utilize such aframework as is evidenced by their lists of translation equivalents, rather than fulldescriptions of meanings, and their lack of a clearly defined semantic model underlying theirlexical treatment. However, they do provide a starting point that can be built upon with acognitive linguistic based methodology. Such a methodology is found in Tyler and Evans(2007) case study of over, a frequent English translation of '7lJ. Tyler and Evans (2007)present how to determine the most prototypical semantic sense (i.e., the Proto-Scene) andhow to distinguish between other distinct semantic senses, all of which represent the lexeme'ssemantic potential. This thesis heuristically utilizes this methodology while stronglyconsidering three other factors. First, the syntactic frame surrounding '7l! is evaluated to assesshow syntactic information, specifically verbal valency, contributes to the preposition'ssemantic value. Second, the frequency of each semantic category is assessed to determinepossible insight into prototypicality within the defined corpus. Third, a radial structure isproposed to represent the semantic relationships between the prototypical and nonprototypicalcategories. This type of organization illustrates a clearly defined semantic modelunderlying the lexical treatment.This study first describes the Proto-Scene, which involves one entity over or upon another.Then, fifteen other distinct semantic categories of '7l! are presented within a radial structure(i.e. The Vertical Cluster: More, Superior, and Control; Contingent Locative;Accompaniment, In, To, Oppositional, For, Frontal, Causal, Norm, Focus of Attention,Instrumental, and Psalms Titles). Finally, the various senses for the morphologically complexlexemes are proposed. These include '7l!1;1 (i.e. From Upon, Away From, Above, andContingent Locative) and '7l!=? (i.e. As Concerning).

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University