Fronting and exhaustive exclusion in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract

Biblical Hebrew scholars struggle to account for about one third of instances of fronting in the Hebrew Bible in terms of a coherent semantic-pragmatic model. I hypothesize that considering fronting as a construction (i.e. a form-meaning pair) that could encode various semantic-pragmatic functions, including “exhaustive exclusion”, could be one of the solutions to this challenge.

Keywords

• focus
• fronting
• exhaustive exclusion
• information structure
• exhaustive inclusion
• negation
• topic