Locatell Christian S. Grammatical polysemy in the Hebrew Bible: a cognitive linguistic approach to כי

Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University, 2017. — 327 p.This study is an investigation into the grammatically polysemous word כי in the Hebrew Bible. Despite much ink spilt on the description of this little word, many questions remain to be fully explored. Studies of the past have traditionally tended toward more or less taxonomic approaches in which the various uses of כי and the contexts in which they are found are listed with relatively little if any explanation of the way they are conceptually connected to each other. Others have tended toward a more or less monosemic approach which attempts to connect all of the uses of כי to a single abstract core that is merely modulated in context to produce its various uses. While the former give descriptive accounts of כי ’s functional diversity but lack an explanation of its coherence, the latter suffer from an overly simplistic coherence that fails to recognize its diversity of usage. The contemporary explosion of explanatorily powerful models for understanding the complexity of language based on converging evidence utilized in cognitive approaches to linguistics, fueled by newly available statistical evidence from an unprecedented amount of crosslinguistic data, calls for a fresh look at grammatical polysemy in the Hebrew Bible, with כי being an example of the phenomenon par excellence. Specifically, developments from Domain Theory, Mental Spaces Theory, and the study of subjectivity from the perspective of cognitive semantics have revealed that all languages will have a repertoire of words and constructions to mark several types of causal relationships basic to communication. Such insights are applied to the analysis of causal כי (its most prototypical usage) to yield psychologically plausible and crosslinguistically applicable categories that prove fruitful for explaining its complexity. Furthermore, such a cognitive perspective also reveals that variations within the semantics of causal כי are observed to have principled affects on its syntactic profile, bringing clarity to the ongoing question of its syntactic status as a subordinator or coordinator. The answer is found by dispensing with the dichotomy and instead locating various uses along a continuum that correlates with its semantic usage. Additionally, a proposal is made concerning the conceptual relationship between causal כי and its various other uses that explains it polysemy on the one hand, but also reveals the principled relationship between and organization of its functions within a coherent usage profile on the other. This is accomplished by heuristically employing crosslinguistically pervasive and cognitively motivated grammaticalization paths in conjunction with the usage profile of כי from Genesis, Leviticus, Ezekiel, Psalms Book 1, and Chronicles, a corpus of 1,058 tokens of כי . From this data is posited a typologically plausible reconstruction of כי ’s diachronic development and the resulting organization of its synchronic polysemy. By employing the notion of prototypicality as determined by contextual frequency, each use of כי is presented with a relative weight of importance. This results in a usage profile that does justice to both the polysemic diversity and conceptual unity of כי.