Syntax and emphasis in Deuteronomy 4-11

The study relates the syntactic phenomena of word order displacement and pleonastic pronouns with finite verbs to emphatic constructions in Biblical Hebrew. After a compilation of the word order patterns in a database of all (non-waw consecutive) main clauses in Gen 12-25, Dt 1-11, 29-31, there is a review of the older studies of Albrecht, Brockelmann, of modern studies in linguistics, and then newer studies in Biblical Hebrew. Linguistic research suggests that word order displacement is a syntactic means many languages have to put information in special focus within a sentence and its context. The term for this special highlighting is 'marked focus.' Pleonastic pronouns with finite verbs also function in many of the same ways as word order displacement, suggesting that this pleonasm is a special focusing device. Based on the review the study suggests a working definition of emphasis in Biblical Hebrew as marked focus, the highlighting of a word or phrase by word order displacement or pleonasm, such that attention is drawn to that word or phrase and its function in the literary context. The study then proceeds to examine Dt. 4-11 to see if these patterns exhibit any specific discourse functions in their contexts. The resulting array of patterns strongly suggests that the purpose of marked focus is to create these discourse functions. The disjunctive clause, for example, involves such constructions as fronting, the grammatical chiasm, the casus pendens, and synchronic parallels, which function to produce contrast, shift in topic, synchonism, the synoptic yielded by the grammatical chiasm, and others. This is a list of the ways the disjunctive clause operates in opposition to the waw consecutive. The consistent presence of such patterns with these two types of marked focus corroborates findings in other language. The method avoids subjectivity by requiring a study of the relationship of the marked function to the literary context, as opposed to logical or implicit contexts.