An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

3.5 Understanding
a In the course of this chapter we have reviewed a number of the basic concepts of
modern linguists. Here we consider two pairs of concepts and briefly touch on a
question behind grammar and exegesis, the question of how people understand
one another across the “barrier” of different languages. This question is at the
juncture of all the human sciences.
b A Saussurian pairing developed for linguistic analysis is syntagm and paradigm.
The term syntagm is introduced above. The word paradigm is familiar in its
ordinary sense of an ordered list of inflectional forms; the Saussurian usage is
slightly different. In his terms, relations between the linguistic elements in the
linear flow of speech (i.e., the ordered arrangement of phonemes and morphemes
as they occur in the speech act) are syntagmatic; relations between linguistic items
not present in this ordered arrangement in the act of speaking are paradigmatic.
The two categories represent two basically different modes of organizing
linguistic material. For example, we can distinguish a linear sequence or
syntagmatic relation such as “noun + attributive adjective” in Hebrew. The
paradigmatic categories involved here are the class of nouns and the class of
attributive adjectives. Consider these groups:
nouns attributive adjectives
ִ
ִ
ָ
ָ
ִ
שׁיא יר ְב ִע
ת ַבּ בוֹט
ל ָמ ָגּ לב ָנ
ר ָבדּ ןוֹשׁאר [Page 61]
Each group is a sample of the paradigmatic classes, and since the classes are
those specified in the syntagmatic relation “noun + attributive adjective,” all
sixteen possible combinations would be syntagmatically available. The phrases
with ת ַבּ would require that the adjective be in the feminine gender. We cannot be
sure that phrases not actually attested would be good Hebrew; לבָ ָנ ל ָמ ָגּ might
have seemed redundant—are not all camels foolish? Such a judgment would be a
matter of semantics.
c Scholars have long suspected that a sentence may have structural features which,
though not apparent in the surface form, are basic to it. Noam Chomsky
distinguished between “surface structure” and “deep structure.” He defined the
surface structure of a sentence as the linear sequence of elements; the deep
structure, which need not be identical with the surface structure, is seen as a more
abstract representation of grammatical relations. The distinction between these