Hebrew

In this dissertation I clarify the significance of verb form selection in the Qumran sectarian texts by determining the extent to which the semantic value of the Hebrew finite verb is temporal, aspectual, or modal in the selected corpus. Standard grammars claim Hebrew was aspect…

Geared primarily towards the choral conductor, this is a comprehensive guide to two major Jewish choral works, Ernest Bloch's Avodath Hakodesh and Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. As both works are sung in Hebrew, this book begins with an overview of the Hebrew language, f…

This dissertation is a text-critical study of the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts of Malachi. Malachi contains 55 verses which are divided into three Hebrew chapters (four chapters in English of the same number of verses). The Hebrew texts consulted are the Masoretic Text B19a (C…

The Grounded Hebrew Semantics (GHS) method developed in this dissertation utilizes concepts and theories from linguistic semantics in order to analyze the sense meanings of certain Biblical Hebrew words (lexemes): me`im, yarek, and beten. Several relevant linguistic and semantic…

Aramaic offers some of the richest sources of dialectal variation within the Semitic language family. Yet comparative dialectal studies in Aramaic syntax are virtually non-existent. The purpose of this dissertation is to exploit the fact of multiple Aramaic translations of the b…

In this dissertation, I translate a selection of poems from Modern Hebrew that contain biblical allusions, and I present that selection in "chronological" order—that is, following the order of the biblical narratives they allude to, thereby creating a retelling of the Hebrew Bib…

This dissertation discusses the work of Yehudah Hayyuj, a 10th century grammarian who worked in Spain and wrote three works on the grammar of Biblical Hebrew. Hayyuj wrote to address two issues. First, Biblical Hebrew had ceased being a spoken language, and as a consequence some…

This study examines the languages of Jews in Europe and Palestine on the one hand, and the Jewish intelligentsia within the Zionist movement on the other. I compare the linguistic preferences of different social strata within European Jewry. The Zionist movement claimed to addre…

Not lost in translation is a short anthology of poems and prose that I have translated from Hebrew to English. There are fifteen poems and three stories by current Israeli authors. The subjects of the poems and prose are about life in Israel, and include universal topics such as…

One of the most unusual features of the book of Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) is its preoccupation with death. For Qoheleth, death is the final and most fundamental negation of anything that a human being can achieve or even understand in the brief span of a life. Interestingly enough…

This dissertation examined the proposal for deciphering the original music of the masoretic accents (te'ami m) which the French musician and composer Suzanne Haik-Vantoura first published in 1976 (English edition, 1991). Three disciplines were utilized in this analysis: musicolo…

Isaac ibn Khalfun (b. ca. 990) was one of the earliest of the “Golden Age” Hebrew poets in al-Andalus, and the only professional Hebrew poet known to us from this period. Though today he is perhaps best-known for the poems which he exchanged with Samuel ha-Nagid of Granada, he w…

The present study argues that one of the traditional axioms in Biblical Hebrew grammar, that the niphal often functions as a reflexive, apparently overlapping with the hithpael, is linguistically unsound. This misunderstanding is based primarily on translation possibilities in t…

This dissertation develops the hypothesis that morphologically-related words are required to be phonologically identical by ranked and violable constraints. Pairs of surface forms are linked by a transderivational or output-to-output (OO) correspondence relation. Through ranking…

A cross-disciplinary project, which debates questions pertaining to both continental philosophy and Hebrew literature, my dissertation (titled: “Dialectical Criticism: A study of Adorno and Abramovich”) begins as a philosophical study of Theodor Adorno's concept of dialectical c…

Babylonian Poetic Accentuation (BPA) has been approached from a diachronic perspective. This dissertation, however, looks at BPA at one point in time, in one manuscript. Its concern is discovering what rules govern Early Babylonian accent placement. Working with the three major …

This thesis examines Arabic and Hebrew causatives and their implications to the morphology-syntax interface and aspecuality. There are two types of causatives in Arabic and Hebrew: verbal and de-adjectival causatives. It is argued that Li's Lexical Mapping Hypothesis (LMH) (fort…

In my dissertation, I compare translations of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice into three languages: German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. The Merchant of Venice was chosen for this project because its translations are particularly demonstrative of the attempt to create national (mod…

Reading poetry in Yiddish, Hebrew and English from across the twentieth century, this dissertation examines how literary lineage is constructed and challenged by Jewish women in Eastern Europe, America and Mandatory Palestine. Between Jewish women's limited access to the past an…

It is a standard finding that speakers reliably produce prosodic cues to clause boundaries and listeners use these cues in parsing sentences. However, considerable uncertainty remains regarding whether the same applies to syntactic phrase boundaries. A long series of studies in …