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Fronting and exhaustive exclusion in Biblical Hebrew
Abstract
Biblical Hebrew scholars struggle to account for about one third of instances of fronting in the Hebrew Bible in terms of a coherent semantic-pragmatic model. I hypothesize that considering fronting as a construction (i.e. a form-meaning pair) that could encode various semantic-pragmatic functions, including “exhaustive exclusion”, could be one of the solutions to this challenge.
Keywords: Focus, fronting, exhaustive exclusion, information structure, exhaustive inclusion, negation, topic