Now that we have surveyed the syntactic distribution of prosodic phrases in Tiberian Hebrew, let us turn to that of prosodic words. These may align with the right edge of xpmax, thus apparently mirroring the distribution of prosodic phrases. Thus, in the following example, the whole sentence constitutes a single prosodic phrase, and right edge of vpmax aligns with the right edge of the conjunctive phrase:
(60) Psa 106:11
ם֑ ֶהי ֵר ָצ םִי֥ ַמ־וּסּ ַכְיַו ⟵
(w=yksw≡mym ṣry=hmφ)
and=cover�pst.3pl≡waters enemies=their
‘And the waters covered their enemies’ (KJV)
However, the prosodic phrase is divided into two prosodic words, the first of whose right edge aligns with the right edge of the maximal projection of the subject np.
The following is parallel, with prosodic word division aligning with the right edges of the pp and of the sentence as a whole:
(61) Job 22:24
ר ֶצ֑ ָבּ ר֥ ָפָע־לַע־תי ִשׁ ְו ⟵
(w=šyt≡ʿl≡ʿpr ω) (bṣrω) and=[setv]≡[on≡dust pp] [goldnp]
‘Then shall you lay gold in the dust’ (after KJV)
Unlike prosodic phrases, however, alignment with the right edge of xpmax is not a general requirement of prosodic words. This can be seen in the fact that an np can readily be split across two prosodic words. Thus in the following two examples the subject nps, בקעי ףא ʾp yʿqb ‘anger of Jacob’, and םיהלא ךאלמ mlʾk ʾlhym ‘angel of God’, respectively, are split across two prosodic words:
(62) Gen 30:2
ל֑ ֵח ָר ְבּ ב ֹ֖קֲעַי ף֥ ַא־ר ַחִֽיַּו ⟵
(w=yḥr ≡ʾpω) (yʿqbω) (b=rḥlω) and=[kindle.pstv] ≡[anger PNnp] [at=PNpp]
‘And Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel’ (KJV) (63) Gen 21:17
֙רָג ָה־ל ֶא ׀ םי ֤ ִהלֱֹא ךְ ַ֙א ְל ַמ ֩א ָר ְק ִיַּו ⟵
(w=yqrʾω) (mlʾkω) (ʾlhymω) (ʾl≡hgrω) and=[calledv] [angel Godnp] [to≡PNpp]
‘And the angel of God called to Hagar’ (KJV)
Evidence will be presented, however, that prosody must make reference to the syntax at least twice, once in the construction of prosodic words, where prosody checks morpheme boundaries, and once in the construction of prosodic phrases. This is argued to be the case (§8.2) because prosodic words, at least in Tiberian Hebrew and Ugaritic, can incorporate morphemes across syntactic phrase boundaries. If so, this is evidence that prosodic phrases are sensitive to syntactic phrasing only at the boundaries of prosodic words; if two morphemes either side of a syntactic phrase boundary have already been combined into a single prosodic word, a phrase boundary does not occur there.
1�6� Previous scholarship 1.6.1. Northwest Semitic
In the orthographies of both ancient and modern Northwest Semitic languages there is agreement that word division is not (morpho-)syntactic in the way that it is, for example, in English or German (cf. e.g. Ravid 2012, 111–112; Lehmann 2016). This emerges clearly in (2) above from the fact that the prefix forms - ְו w-, - ְבּ b- and - ַה ha- are translated with words with independent orthographic status in the English translation, namely, and, in and the. Word division in Northwest Semitic orthographies must therefore mark out some other kind of unit, larger than the morpheme. However, this is where the area of scholarly consensus comes to an end.
One set of scholars hold that word division morphosyntactic units, albeit not the same morphosyntactic unit targeted by word division in English. Donner & Röllig (1968, 2), for instance, presuppose a syntactic explanation in their discussion of orthographic proclitics in the Phoenician ʾAḥirom inscription (KAI 1):24
24 Original: ‘[D]as Relativum ז … ist wegen seiner engen syntaktischen Verbindung mit dem Verbum diesem ohne Worttrenner vorangestelt’.
The relative ז …, because of its close syntactic connection with the verb, is placed before it without a word divider
In the same vein Millard (2012b, 25) states that Hebrew scribes practiced word division
‘normally with a point after each word, except when they were bound together grammatically.’ The implication, at least from the use of the term ‘grammatical’, is that it is morphosyntactic, rather than prosodic, factors that lead to the obligatory orthographic cliticization of words like - ְבּ b- ‘in’, - ַה ha- ‘the’ and - ְו w- ‘and’, and, furthermore, that orthographic wordhood in Hebrew is a function of grammar, rather than prosody. Similar, at least in this respect, is Aronoff (1985), who argues that Masoretic punctuation as a whole has a syntactic basis.
By contrast, Friedrich, Röllig & Amadasi Guzzo in their grammar of Phoenician-Punic (Friedrich, Röllig & Amadasi Guzzo 1999, 146, §219) relate the issue of word division explicitly to the question of accent, that is, prosody: they state that in the oldest phase of the language the governing noun of a genitive construction retains its original vocalisation.25 This is to say that the accent is retained. The implication is that, were the accent to have been lost, we would find genitive constructions written as a single graphematic word.26 As we will see (§3.6), this logic does not in fact follow, at least as far as it depends on comparison with Tiberian Hebrew, since not all such chains form single prosodic words there.
Robertson (1994, 361–363) takes a similarly prosodic approach in her treatment of Ugaritic literary material. Although she does not finally decide exactly what kind of unit is demarcated, Robertson suggests that word division there is ‘based at least in part on a sound length value which may have been related to some aspect of verse structure’ (Robertson 1994, 363).
Other scholars are more ambivalent. Lehmann (2016, 37*) puts the matter as follows:
[T]he signs generally known as word dividers by no means mark lexemic word boundaries in every case. Rather, these often seem to be mere delimitation marks for prosodic breath units or morpho-grammatical and other units.
Lehmann leaves open the precise purpose of word division in West Semitic orthographies. He concludes, in general terms, that the word divider is a ‘low-level supra-segmental graphic delimitation mark’, proposing the term ‘low-level graphic separation mark’ to describe it (Lehmann 2016, 38*). Lehmann mentions two specific
25 Friedrich, Röllig & Amadasi Guzzo (1999, 146, §219): ‘Die alten Inschriften mit Worttrennung schreiben Genetivverbindungen gewöhlnich ungetrennt wie ein Wort … Die Stellung des regierenden Nomens im tonlosen ‘Status constructus’ hat im Phönizisch-Punischen der älteren Zeit den ursprünglichen Vokalismus des Wortes erhalten.’
26 In a similar vein, compare the identification of proclitic prepositions (Friedrich, Röllig & Amadasi Guzzo 1999, 180, §251) and the representation with shwa of the conjunctions 〈w〉 and 〈k〉 (Friedrich, Röllig & Amadasi Guzzo 1999, 185–186, §257).
possibilities, namely, that word dividers serve as delimitation marks for a) ‘prosodic breath units’, or b) ‘morpho-grammatical’ units, thereby identifying the domains in which word division may be operating as either prosody (= phonology) or morpho-syntax.
Finally, prosody and morphosyntax sit side-by-side in Dresher’s analysis of Biblical Hebrew orthography: in Dresher (1994, 9), Dresher distinguishes ‘grammatical’ clitics, on the one hand, which ‘are morphemes that obligatorily cliticize onto their host’
and ‘may never stand as independent words’, from ‘prosodic clitics’, which are
‘potentially independent words which are cliticized in particular situations’.
As the foregoing brief survey shows, the literature on word division in Northwest Semitic is characterised by a lack of consensus, and in some quarters, by a certain vagueness, concerning the target of word division. This the case both on whether graphematic words correspond to (morpho-)syntactic or prosodic units, and on what characterises a prosodic word. To my knowledge, with only one exception, to be discussed immediately below, none of the scholars who have examined the orthographic word in Northwest Semitic writing systems have considered the possibility that it might correspond to the prosodic word as defined in the phonological linguistic literature (§1.4.2).
The exception just mentioned is Dresher’s work on prosody in the Tiberian Hebrew tradition (esp. Dresher 1994; 2009). For Dresher the prosodic word corresponds not to the unit separated by spaces in the consonantal text, but to that which is joined by maqqef. Maqqef is a dash-like grapheme 〈־〉 which is used to join two words of the consonantal text, e.g. Gen. 1:2 םִי ָֽמּ ַה י֥ ֵנ ְפּ־לַע ʿl≡pny h-mym ‘over the face of the water’, where the preposition לַע ʿl ‘on, over’ and the noun י֥ ֵנ ְפּ pny
‘face’ are joined by maqqef.
Since maqqef was introduced in the early medieval scribal tradition, this unit has no counterpart in ancient Northwest Semitic writing. For Dresher, the orthographic word, that is, the word separated by spaces in the pre-medieval manuscript tradition corresponds to the unit separated either by spaces or by maqqef in the medieval tradition. For Dresher this unit is rather a potential prosodic word. This insight turns out to be very helpful for Tiberian Hebrew, not least since there we have direct access to a prosodic parsing of the Biblical Hebrew material in the form of the tradition of accents, against which we can test the prosodic status of the orthographic word.
However, we lack this information for Ugaritic and the early epigraphic sources for Northwest Semitic writing.
This does not mean, however, that nothing can be said about the linguistics of word division in these purely epigraphic sources. This is because the word division strategy adopted for a given language will have a profile corresponding to the nature of wordhood at that level (§1.4). Section 1.7 outlines the methods that will be used in the course of this study to achieve this. Before that, however, I provide a brief survey of the study of graphematic word division in Ancient Greek and the evidence for the consensus opinion there.
1.6.2. Ancient Greek