“Give” Structures in the Book of Numbers: A Case Study of Information Structure in Biblical Hebrew

Information Structure (IS) has been an increasingly lively research area in linguistics in recent years. Various studies suggest approaches from different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives have been developed. Recent studies of the Biblical Text indicate the importance of IS to the understanding of the overall cognitive development of a text. While previous studies of IS in biblical text concentrate mainly on the location of NP's with respect to the verb (e.g. Topicalization and Verb inversion), this study focuses on Ditransitive verb constructions. More specifically, this study investigates the different structures available in the biblical text for the verb 'give'. Initial observation of a corpus including the occurrences of the verb 'give' in the book of Numbers suggests three main structures: a. (Full NP) Direct Object -> (Full NP) Indirect Object (e.g. Num. 3: 9)1; b. (Pronominal) Indirect Object -> (Full NP) Direct Object (e.g. Num. 27: 7); and c. Direct object Relative clause (e.g. Num. 20: 24). The goal of this study is to explain this word order variation by IS theory, and to provide a possible account for deviating word orders.