An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax

4.3 Phrase and Clause
a A phrase is, in one sense, a group of words used as an equivalent of a single word
class. 9 Consider the earlier example sentence, ‘The brown chimpanzee eats
heartily,’ alongside the sentence, ‘The brown chimpanzee eats with zeal’; ‘with
zeal,’ a group of words, follows the same distribution pattern and has the same
grammatical value as ‘heartily,’ in the sense that both modify a verb. Thus, just as
‘heartily’ is an adverb, ‘with zeal’ is an “adverbial phrase.” In the sentence, ‘The
dog with shaggy hair bites cruelly,’ the group of words ‘with shaggy heir’
functions like the adjective ‘black’ in the sentence, ‘The black dog bites cruelly.’
We call a group of words that function like an adjective an “adjectival phrase.”
There are similarly nominal phrases, verbal phrases, etc.
b Another, distinct sense of phrase is also useful. In this sense a phrase includes a
governing word and all it governs. A prepositional phrase is a preposition and its
object; a participial phrase is a participle and the words it governs, whether in
construct or through a preposition; and a construct phrase includes all the nouns in
a construct chain.
c We noted in Chapter 3 that language serves as a medium or code by which a
speaker communicates thoughts or experiences to an audience. A clause
designates an utterance in which the speaker makes a comment on a topic. The
topic is called “the subject” and the comment “the predicate.” 10 The subject is
expressed by a noun or an equivalent; the predicate of a verbal clause is a verb or
an equivalent, while that of a verbless clause is a complementing noun.
d A clause is the syntactic combination of a subject and predicate. The subject or
predicate may be compound, as in, ‘The dog and the chimpanzee bit cruelly’
(compound subject) or ‘The dog bit and ate its victim cruelly’ (compound
predicate) or ‘The dog and the chimpanzee bit and ate their victims cruelly’
(compound subject, compound predicate). Each of these utterances consists of a
single topic and a single comment about it. In contrast, the sentence, ‘The dog was
eating its victim when the chimpanzee arrived,’[Page 69] consists of two clauses;
9 On word combinations and phrases (Wortgruppe), see Richter, GAHG 2. 3–4; on
phrase types and agreement with them, GAHG 2. 9–69, 3. 14–34.
10 The distinction of subject/predicate ~ onoma/rhēma ~ topic/comment goes back to
Plato’s Sophist. The various sets of terms are not always mutually equivalent. Some
authors take subject/predicate as properly terms of logic. Some take topic/comment as
properly referring to a larger discourse structure (cf. 4.8). The functions involved in
this set of oppositions can, if taken from an extralinguistic perspective, be seen as
variously distributed in the parts of a given utterance. It is sometimes argued that the
subject/predicate relation can involve predication or determination (or even
coordination); see 8.4 on verbless clauses. Cf. on this topic Swiggers,
“L’Encyclopédie,” 133–34, 138–43.