Alternative Relations and Higher-Level Categories

Abstract

Abstract Alternative relations are one of the main relation types between states of affairs and disjunctions are the dedicated morphosyntactic constructions used for encoding them. The standard approach to disjunctions, which assumes two readings, Inclusive and Exclusive, has recently been challenged. A fundamental requirement, shared by the alternatives in all the readings they identified, is that they must be construable as members of a single higher-level category. This requirement also defines specifically one of the readings of disjunctions, or or constructions, HLC (the Higher-level category reading), in which the explicit disjuncts serve only as a means for constructing, often only ad-hoc, a higher-level concept. This concept, rather than the explicit alternatives, is actually the prominent concept profiled by the construction. The study presented here adopts the same bottom-up Usage-Based approach advocated by Ariel and Mauri, and examines the Hebrew or constructions of the Old Testament, given in the Masoretic Tiberian version. It focusses on the question of how those categories are constructed. The data was analyzed adopting a comparative linguistic and textual method, and taking into consideration different philological and diachronic aspects. It reveals that HLC (such as ‘any beast’ for ox or ass, Exodus 23, 4) is the most common reading in this corpus (108/319, 34%). Interestingly, the higher-level categories are extracted from disjuncts of various parts of speech and can be explicit, but in most cases they are inferred. Furthermore, we observe cases which almost equally profile both the single, higher-level category and the alternatives. The methodology adopted revealed some linguistic changes in progress, as well as inclinations of ancient biblical editors and jurists.