Books by Michal Marmorstein
Clause Combining in Semitic: The circumstantial clause and beyond, edited by Bo Isaksson and Mari... more Clause Combining in Semitic: The circumstantial clause and beyond, edited by Bo Isaksson and Maria Persson. Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 96. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015.
418 pages. ISBN 978-3-447-10405-0.
http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/title_947.ahtml
The volume presents the results of an international project carried out in co-operation between the Uppsala University, the Hebrew University in Jerusa-lem, Lund University and the University of Gothenburg. The questions put forward in the project were: How is hypotaxis marked in Semitic, other than by conjunctions? How does this affect the organization of texts? More specifically, what constitutes a circumstantial clause? To find an answer to these questions, all the major Semitic language families and some modern spoken Semitic dialects were surveyed within the project.
Thus, Clause Combining in Semitic: The Circumstantial Clause and Beyond examines how different kinds of clauses combine to a text in a number of Semitic languages (Ethio-Semitic not included). Specifically, many of its chapters examine how circumstantial clauses are coded in individual Semitic languages.
Contents of the volume:
Clause Combining in Arabic dialects
Heléne Kammensjö
Circumstantial Clause Linking in Egyptian Arabic Narration
Maria Persson
Non-main Clause Combining in Damascene Arabic:
A scale of markedness
Clause Combining in Written Arabic
Michal Marmorstein
The Domain of Verbal Circumstantial Clauses in Classical Arabic
Clause Combining in Biblical Hebrew
Bo Isaksson
The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew. A Clause Combining Approach
Clause Combining in Modern Spoken Aramaic
Eran Cohen
Circumstantial Clause Combining in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect
of Zakho
Clause Combining in Epigraphic South Arabian
Jan Retsö
The Problem of Circumstantial Clause Combining (CCC) in Sabaean
Clause Combining in East Semitic
Eran Cohen
Circumstantial Clause Combining in Old Babylonian Akkadian
Index of terms
This book is the outcome of the International Symposium on Clause Linking in Semitic Languages, K... more This book is the outcome of the International Symposium on Clause Linking in Semitic Languages, Kivik, Sweden, 5-7 August 2012. A strong incentive for the symposium was the renewed interest, in recent years, in the nature of non-main clause linking. Current research has brought into focus the concept of a main line and digressions from the main line in various discourse types. The conference invited papers on all related topics with emphasis on “ways of combining clauses other than through relative clause and complement clause constructions”.
The editors are proud to present this original research for the first time to the international audience.
Contents of the volume:
Clause linking in Arabic dialects
Heléne Kammensjö: Circumstantial Clause Combining in Oral Egyptian Arabic: A preliminary report covering aspects of asyndesis and auxiliation
Maria Persson: Non-Main Clause Linking and Verb Form Switch in Syrian Arabic: Is there a circumstantial clause?
Clause linking in written Arabic
Hans Lagerqvist: Convergent Syntax in Modern Standard Arabic: Indefinite relative clauses and asyndetic ḥāl clauses
Michal Marmorstein: Verbal Syntax and Textual Structure in Classical Arabic Prose
Clause linking in Biblical Hebrew
Gregor Geiger: Constructions which Precede the wayyiqṭōl Chain in Biblical Hebrew
Bo Isaksson: Archaic Biblical Hebrew Poetry: The Linking of Finite Clauses
Reinhard G. Lehmann: “Since, while and whilst I am a poor man.” The Legacy of Diethelm Michel’s Nominal-Clause Syntax as Applied to a Wider Field of 1st Millennium BCE Northwest Semitic
Alviero Niccacci: Background Constructions inside the Main Line in Biblical Hebrew
Frank Polak: The Circumstantial Clause as Trigger: Syntax, discourse and plot structure in biblical narrative
Clause linking in Ethio-Semitic
Lutz Edzard: Complex predicates and Circumstantial Clause Combining (CCC): Serial Verbs and Converbs in a Comparative Semitic Perspective
Clause linking in East Semitic
Eran Cohen: The Domain: A Formal Syntactic Unit Above Sentence Level
Palestinian Arabic by Michal Marmorstein
Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik, 2018
In this paper we deal with a type of construction in Rural Palestinian Arabic (RPA) which present... more In this paper we deal with a type of construction in Rural Palestinian Arabic (RPA) which presents the co-occurrence of a verb and its unmodified cognate verbal noun, e.g.: yixunkūna xanik ‘they suffocate us completely’, yismaʕ samaʕ ‘he listens attentively’.
The unmodified cognate complement (UCC) – known in traditional terminology as mafʕūl muṭlaq mubham – is generally described as an emphasizing device. At the same time, it evidently yields a bewildering wide range of interpretations. Our paper is an attempt to uncover the semantic mechanism that underlies this varied interpretability (hence translatability), as well as the contextual conditions which call for the use of this construction.
Based on the examination of a large collection of examples, extracted mainly from naturally occurring discourse in RPA, we observe that the core function of the UCC is to lay focus on a certain semantic feature of the verbal event and exhaust its semantic potential. We propose a semantic model which explains how this function is variously interpreted with four types of verbal events, combining either positive or privative values of the aspectual features phasality and boundedness.
By providing a ‘technical’ reading of each type, the model not only accounts for the UCC tokens attested in the corpus, but also enables the prediction of the meaning of other tokens which pertain to the identified types, in RPA and also in other varieties of Arabic.
Papers by Michal Marmorstein
This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Nonc... more This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc-nd 3.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, and distribution, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: "Brill". See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
BRILL eBooks, 2016
This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Nonc... more This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc-nd 3.0) License, which permits any non-commercial use, and distribution, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: "Brill". See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
Research Square (Research Square), Oct 7, 2022
The paper reports on the creation of the HUJI Corpus of Spoken Hebrew (HUJICorpus) which document... more The paper reports on the creation of the HUJI Corpus of Spoken Hebrew (HUJICorpus) which documents naturally occurring speech and interaction in Modern Hebrew. Data come from telephone conversations recorded during the years 2020-2021. The focus on telephone conversations as a primary resource enables to reduce some of the semiotic complexity and concentrate on the linguistic (verbal and vocal) features of the interaction. Drawing on the principles of Interactional Linguistics, the recordings are transcribed using a highly granular system of formal annotation which accurately captures the temporal, sequential and prosodic aspects of talk-in-interaction. The audio les and transcripts were made freely accessible online, thus lling a widely acknowledged need for a publicly accessible and updated corpus of spoken Modern Hebrew.
The volume presents the results of an international project carried out in cooperation between th... more The volume presents the results of an international project carried out in cooperation between the Uppsala University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Lund University and the University of Gothenburg. The questions put forward in the project were: How is hypotaxis marked in Semitic, other than by conjunctions? How does this affect the organization of texts? More specifically, what constitutes a circumstantial clause? To find an answer to these questions, all the major Semitic language families and some modern spoken Semitic dialects were surveyed within the project. Thus, Clause Combining in Semitic: The Circumstantial Clause and Beyond examines how different kinds of clauses combine to a text in a number of Semitic languages (Ethio-Semitic not included). Specifically, many of its chapters examine how circumstantial clauses are coded in individual Semitic languages. (Less)
Contrastive Pragmatics
This paper presents a study of Arabic waḷḷāhi (lit. ‘by God’) and English really when they are us... more This paper presents a study of Arabic waḷḷāhi (lit. ‘by God’) and English really when they are used interactionally as newsmarks. The literature has claimed that the role of newsmarks in conversation is to treat prior talk as news, to open up a slot for further talk, to express doubt or disbelief, and to implement requests for confirmation. A close analysis of waḷḷāhi and really shows that they do not necessarily follow the patterns described by previous research. Instead, the data suggest that newsmarks primarily contribute to the construction of prior talk as remarkable, that is, tellable and noteworthy; and that some previously described functions are epiphenomenal of this more basic property. The data are recordings of naturally occurring everyday conversations in British English and Egyptian Arabic, with English translations.
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2021
The article explores the structure and use of the existential verb baka in Rural Palestinian Arab... more The article explores the structure and use of the existential verb baka in Rural Palestinian Arabic for the introduction of orientation sections and fragments in narrative discourse. In clause-initial position the existential verb presents a non-inflecting form, either the 3MSG perfect baka or the MSG active participle bāki. We argue that the noninflectability of baka and bāki is indicative of their syntactic detached-ness from the following unit and is explained by their discourse-disjunctive function. We show that the existential baka/bāki serves to introduce both narrative-initial and narrative-embedded orientation. It may initiate utterances containing simple nominals or whole clauses. The distribution of the specific patterns is determined, inter alia, by the genre of the narrative told. Finally, we propose that the preference of the participle bāki over baka in folktales and in less committed instances of personal narratives may be related to the evidential function of the act...
Journal of Pragmatics, 2022
Interactional Linguistics, 2021
Large conversational activities (e.g., storytelling) necessitate a suspension of ordinary turn-ta... more Large conversational activities (e.g., storytelling) necessitate a suspension of ordinary turn-taking rules. In the resulting constellation of main speaker and recipient, minimal displays of cooperative recipiency become relevant at particular junctures. We investigate this mechanism by focusing on the Egyptian Arabic particle ʔāh ‘yeah’ when thus used. We observe that tokens of ʔāh are mobilized by main speakers via the opening of prosodic slots at local pragmatic completion points. The prosodic design of the particle at these points is sensitive to prior talk and displays recipients’ alignment at the structural, action-sequential, and relational levels. This is done through variation of three prosodic features, namely, rhythm-based timing, pitch configuration, and prominence. The measure of alignment proposed by ʔāh is implicative for the continuation of the turn. While smooth progression suggests that ʔāh is understood to be sufficiently fitted and aligned, expansions are traceab...
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 2016
Functions of Language
This paper explores the use of the discourse marker (DM) yaʕni (lit. ‘it means’) in spoken and wr... more This paper explores the use of the discourse marker (DM) yaʕni (lit. ‘it means’) in spoken and written Egyptian-Cairene Arabic. The DM yaʕni originates in conversational interaction and is symbiotic with its socio-cognitive constraints and goals: it serves to facilitate the verbalization of new or hard-to-activate ideas and to optimize the verbalization of already-introduced ideas, so as to enhance participants’ mutual understanding and involvement. When carried over to written discourse, yaʕni undergoes various forms of adaptation. In casual-personal prose yaʕni is frequently used, however the distribution of the tokens is different and their function recontextualized. Tokens introducing new ideas are few and acquire symbolic meaning, while tokens introducing elaboration of prior discourse are widely used and serve to evoke conversational interaction. In expository discourse, as reflected in Egyptian Wikipedia, yaʕni is considerably less frequent and limited to elaborations of conc...
Discourse, Context and Media, 2021
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Books by Michal Marmorstein
418 pages. ISBN 978-3-447-10405-0.
http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/title_947.ahtml
The volume presents the results of an international project carried out in co-operation between the Uppsala University, the Hebrew University in Jerusa-lem, Lund University and the University of Gothenburg. The questions put forward in the project were: How is hypotaxis marked in Semitic, other than by conjunctions? How does this affect the organization of texts? More specifically, what constitutes a circumstantial clause? To find an answer to these questions, all the major Semitic language families and some modern spoken Semitic dialects were surveyed within the project.
Thus, Clause Combining in Semitic: The Circumstantial Clause and Beyond examines how different kinds of clauses combine to a text in a number of Semitic languages (Ethio-Semitic not included). Specifically, many of its chapters examine how circumstantial clauses are coded in individual Semitic languages.
Contents of the volume:
Clause Combining in Arabic dialects
Heléne Kammensjö
Circumstantial Clause Linking in Egyptian Arabic Narration
Maria Persson
Non-main Clause Combining in Damascene Arabic:
A scale of markedness
Clause Combining in Written Arabic
Michal Marmorstein
The Domain of Verbal Circumstantial Clauses in Classical Arabic
Clause Combining in Biblical Hebrew
Bo Isaksson
The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew. A Clause Combining Approach
Clause Combining in Modern Spoken Aramaic
Eran Cohen
Circumstantial Clause Combining in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect
of Zakho
Clause Combining in Epigraphic South Arabian
Jan Retsö
The Problem of Circumstantial Clause Combining (CCC) in Sabaean
Clause Combining in East Semitic
Eran Cohen
Circumstantial Clause Combining in Old Babylonian Akkadian
Index of terms
The editors are proud to present this original research for the first time to the international audience.
Contents of the volume:
Clause linking in Arabic dialects
Heléne Kammensjö: Circumstantial Clause Combining in Oral Egyptian Arabic: A preliminary report covering aspects of asyndesis and auxiliation
Maria Persson: Non-Main Clause Linking and Verb Form Switch in Syrian Arabic: Is there a circumstantial clause?
Clause linking in written Arabic
Hans Lagerqvist: Convergent Syntax in Modern Standard Arabic: Indefinite relative clauses and asyndetic ḥāl clauses
Michal Marmorstein: Verbal Syntax and Textual Structure in Classical Arabic Prose
Clause linking in Biblical Hebrew
Gregor Geiger: Constructions which Precede the wayyiqṭōl Chain in Biblical Hebrew
Bo Isaksson: Archaic Biblical Hebrew Poetry: The Linking of Finite Clauses
Reinhard G. Lehmann: “Since, while and whilst I am a poor man.” The Legacy of Diethelm Michel’s Nominal-Clause Syntax as Applied to a Wider Field of 1st Millennium BCE Northwest Semitic
Alviero Niccacci: Background Constructions inside the Main Line in Biblical Hebrew
Frank Polak: The Circumstantial Clause as Trigger: Syntax, discourse and plot structure in biblical narrative
Clause linking in Ethio-Semitic
Lutz Edzard: Complex predicates and Circumstantial Clause Combining (CCC): Serial Verbs and Converbs in a Comparative Semitic Perspective
Clause linking in East Semitic
Eran Cohen: The Domain: A Formal Syntactic Unit Above Sentence Level
Palestinian Arabic by Michal Marmorstein
The unmodified cognate complement (UCC) – known in traditional terminology as mafʕūl muṭlaq mubham – is generally described as an emphasizing device. At the same time, it evidently yields a bewildering wide range of interpretations. Our paper is an attempt to uncover the semantic mechanism that underlies this varied interpretability (hence translatability), as well as the contextual conditions which call for the use of this construction.
Based on the examination of a large collection of examples, extracted mainly from naturally occurring discourse in RPA, we observe that the core function of the UCC is to lay focus on a certain semantic feature of the verbal event and exhaust its semantic potential. We propose a semantic model which explains how this function is variously interpreted with four types of verbal events, combining either positive or privative values of the aspectual features phasality and boundedness.
By providing a ‘technical’ reading of each type, the model not only accounts for the UCC tokens attested in the corpus, but also enables the prediction of the meaning of other tokens which pertain to the identified types, in RPA and also in other varieties of Arabic.
Papers by Michal Marmorstein
418 pages. ISBN 978-3-447-10405-0.
http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/title_947.ahtml
The volume presents the results of an international project carried out in co-operation between the Uppsala University, the Hebrew University in Jerusa-lem, Lund University and the University of Gothenburg. The questions put forward in the project were: How is hypotaxis marked in Semitic, other than by conjunctions? How does this affect the organization of texts? More specifically, what constitutes a circumstantial clause? To find an answer to these questions, all the major Semitic language families and some modern spoken Semitic dialects were surveyed within the project.
Thus, Clause Combining in Semitic: The Circumstantial Clause and Beyond examines how different kinds of clauses combine to a text in a number of Semitic languages (Ethio-Semitic not included). Specifically, many of its chapters examine how circumstantial clauses are coded in individual Semitic languages.
Contents of the volume:
Clause Combining in Arabic dialects
Heléne Kammensjö
Circumstantial Clause Linking in Egyptian Arabic Narration
Maria Persson
Non-main Clause Combining in Damascene Arabic:
A scale of markedness
Clause Combining in Written Arabic
Michal Marmorstein
The Domain of Verbal Circumstantial Clauses in Classical Arabic
Clause Combining in Biblical Hebrew
Bo Isaksson
The Verbal System of Biblical Hebrew. A Clause Combining Approach
Clause Combining in Modern Spoken Aramaic
Eran Cohen
Circumstantial Clause Combining in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect
of Zakho
Clause Combining in Epigraphic South Arabian
Jan Retsö
The Problem of Circumstantial Clause Combining (CCC) in Sabaean
Clause Combining in East Semitic
Eran Cohen
Circumstantial Clause Combining in Old Babylonian Akkadian
Index of terms
The editors are proud to present this original research for the first time to the international audience.
Contents of the volume:
Clause linking in Arabic dialects
Heléne Kammensjö: Circumstantial Clause Combining in Oral Egyptian Arabic: A preliminary report covering aspects of asyndesis and auxiliation
Maria Persson: Non-Main Clause Linking and Verb Form Switch in Syrian Arabic: Is there a circumstantial clause?
Clause linking in written Arabic
Hans Lagerqvist: Convergent Syntax in Modern Standard Arabic: Indefinite relative clauses and asyndetic ḥāl clauses
Michal Marmorstein: Verbal Syntax and Textual Structure in Classical Arabic Prose
Clause linking in Biblical Hebrew
Gregor Geiger: Constructions which Precede the wayyiqṭōl Chain in Biblical Hebrew
Bo Isaksson: Archaic Biblical Hebrew Poetry: The Linking of Finite Clauses
Reinhard G. Lehmann: “Since, while and whilst I am a poor man.” The Legacy of Diethelm Michel’s Nominal-Clause Syntax as Applied to a Wider Field of 1st Millennium BCE Northwest Semitic
Alviero Niccacci: Background Constructions inside the Main Line in Biblical Hebrew
Frank Polak: The Circumstantial Clause as Trigger: Syntax, discourse and plot structure in biblical narrative
Clause linking in Ethio-Semitic
Lutz Edzard: Complex predicates and Circumstantial Clause Combining (CCC): Serial Verbs and Converbs in a Comparative Semitic Perspective
Clause linking in East Semitic
Eran Cohen: The Domain: A Formal Syntactic Unit Above Sentence Level
The unmodified cognate complement (UCC) – known in traditional terminology as mafʕūl muṭlaq mubham – is generally described as an emphasizing device. At the same time, it evidently yields a bewildering wide range of interpretations. Our paper is an attempt to uncover the semantic mechanism that underlies this varied interpretability (hence translatability), as well as the contextual conditions which call for the use of this construction.
Based on the examination of a large collection of examples, extracted mainly from naturally occurring discourse in RPA, we observe that the core function of the UCC is to lay focus on a certain semantic feature of the verbal event and exhaust its semantic potential. We propose a semantic model which explains how this function is variously interpreted with four types of verbal events, combining either positive or privative values of the aspectual features phasality and boundedness.
By providing a ‘technical’ reading of each type, the model not only accounts for the UCC tokens attested in the corpus, but also enables the prediction of the meaning of other tokens which pertain to the identified types, in RPA and also in other varieties of Arabic.