Performatives in Biblical Aramaic

Abstract

This article analyses Biblical Aramaic (BA) performatives within a prototype approach. The authors demonstrate that BA performatives largely comply with the crosslinguistic prototype and its grammatical and extra-grammatical features. Crucially, although the two ‘tenses’ used, Suffix Conjugation (SC) and Active Participle (AP), exhibit similar frequency in performatives, they differ in distribution: the performative SC is more conventionalised/archaic/typical of Ezra while the performative AP is more productive/innovative/ typical of Daniel. These differences reflect the gradual replacement of SC by AP in performatives due to the profound advancement of the two ‘tenses’ along their respective grammaticalisation paths: the resultative and imperfective paths.