Articles by Christian Locatell
This article concludes the special issue of Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus dedicated to ... more This article concludes the special issue of Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus dedicated to the diachrony of Serial Verb Constructions. The authors of the ten contributions included in the volume discuss the most important results of their studies and suggest the possible lines for future research.
Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus, Vol. 65, 89-103, 2022
This paper presents examples in which hlk 'walk, go' and ʔth 'come' appear in multi-verb construc... more This paper presents examples in which hlk 'walk, go' and ʔth 'come' appear in multi-verb constructions conforming to the definition of asymmetrical serial verb constructions (SVCs). In these constructions, hlk and ʔth do not appear to be used with their concrete lexical senses as verbs constituting the predicate of a separate clause. Rather, they are found in the V1 position and appear to be used as minor verbs contributing an aspectual nuance of immediacy to the major verb in the V2 position. Broader usage of these verbal forms in Old Aramaic and cognate languages is consistent with a source of such SVCs from the fusion of bi-clausal constructions.
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2022
This paper discusses a krater recently discovered in a cultic building at Tel Burna in the Shephe... more This paper discusses a krater recently discovered in a cultic building at Tel Burna in the Shephelah. Of special interest is the krater’s relatively well-preserved deco- ration containing multiple nature scenes related to the so-called tree of life or sacred tree motif. The krater’s physical description and archaeological context and the decoration’s relationship to relevant comparanda are explored in order to elucidate the significance of its iconography. In light of this discussion, we conclude that the decoration includes an abstract representation of a Canaanite goddess as a “pubis of life” variation of the “tree of life” motif on the krater as a votive vessel in the Late Bronze Age cult.
Written for Our Instruction: Essays in Honor of William Varner, 2021
This article explores the often-debated topic of polysemy—the idea that words have multiple (some... more This article explores the often-debated topic of polysemy—the idea that words have multiple (sometimes seemingly unrelated) meanings and functions which haunt the first-year Greek student. It presents the theory of grammaticalization (the universal process by which lexical words develop grammatical functions and by which grammatical words develop additional grammatical functions) as a way of making sense of the various meanings and uses of polysemous and multi-functional words. The notoriously multifunctional word ὡς is taken as a test case. It proposes a reconstruction of the development of some the main functions of ὡς as well as the inferential processes in communication responsible for its extended uses which are known to facilitate such developments crosslinguistically. It is suggested that such a perspective on how words develop and how such a development shapes their meanings provides a better understanding of how meaning works and a surer footing when approaching the interpretation of the New Testament (and beyond).
Aramaic Studies, 2022
This article presents nine Syriac graffiti which until now have been overlooked in the literature... more This article presents nine Syriac graffiti which until now have been overlooked in the literature on the well-known inscriptions at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. These additional graffiti attest to known and unknown Syriac pilgrims who visited the church. Some can be located within the Ottoman period while the date of others is less clear. Several of the graffiti are of particular interest. One attests to the visitation of a well-known East Syriac cleric, and another provides a clue to the architectural history of the closed eastern door at the southern entrance.
https://doi.org/10.1163/17455227-bja10030
Jerusalem and the Coastal Plain in the Iron Age and Persian Periods, 2022
New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew, 2021
Adverbial conjunctions often communicate multiple interclausal relationships in a constrained set... more Adverbial conjunctions often communicate multiple interclausal relationships in a constrained set of polysemy patterns (e.g., time and cause, place and condition, or comparison, time, and condition, to name but a few). This raises several questions: How are these different meanings conceptually related to each other? What processes led to the proliferation of meanings for a single form? And how may these meanings be diachronically ordered in a form’s developmental history? This study approaches these questions regarding adverbial conjunctions in Biblical Hebrew with the following methodology: (1) construct a usage profile of the form(s) in question; (2) heuristically employ diachronic semantic maps to generate hypotheses about the conceptual and diachronic organisation of uses; (3) test these hypotheses by examining corpus data for plausible bridging contexts; (4) compare these results to comparative data where available. This method yields plausible reconstructions of a form’s diachronic development, even when only synchronic data are available.
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0250.19.pdf
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2020
Past analyses of כי have tended toward descriptive taxonomies or proposals of a highly abstract s... more Past analyses of כי have tended toward descriptive taxonomies or proposals of a highly abstract semantic core. Taxonomic approaches have the strength of descriptive rigour while proposals of an abstract core have the strength of offering a coherent analysis of its various uses. However, the former offer little or no explanation for the semantic variation of כי, and the latter simply attribute such variation to context. This paper argues that the best analysis of כי (or any such polysemous word) will both account for real variation in meaning without simply attributing it to context, and will also explain the principled connection between seemingly unrelated uses. Utilizing insights from cognitive semantics and grammaticalization theory, this paper will argue that temporal כי spans an internally complex semantic category, the various points of which served as the source for semantic extensions into its causal and conditional uses.
Qadmoniyot , 2019
An overview of the past ten years of research at Tel Burna (in Hebrew)
Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages, 2019
The particle כי communicates a variety of causal relationships as an adverbial conjunction. This ... more The particle כי communicates a variety of causal relationships as an adverbial conjunction. This has led to a profusion of different approaches to describe its use, from the taxonomy approach of many lexica which simply list a variety of uses without any clear and principled groupings, to various proposals of causal categories which attempt to explain the varying distribution of causal כי .Much of the previous research on this topic has been the fruitful result of keen observations by seasoned Hebraists. Building on the intuitive insights of past work, this paper offers an analysis of causal כי based on theoretically grounded and psychologically plausible causal categories attested to by converging evidence from crosslinguistic and cognitively-oriented research on adverbial conjunctions.
G. Kotzé, C. Locatell, and J. Messara (eds), Ancient Texts and Modern Readers: Studies in Ancient Hebrew Linguistics and Bible Translation. Studia Semitica Neerlandica, 71. Leiden: Brill, 2019
In the study of the Hebrew Bible, the categories of syntactic dependence or independence of a cla... more In the study of the Hebrew Bible, the categories of syntactic dependence or independence of a clause has been generally limited to coordination (sometimes called parataxis or juxtaposition) and subordination (sometimes called hypotaxis), respectively. There are those who have noted the difficulty of clearly distinguishing between coordinate and subordinate clauses in some cases. For instance, Andersen concluded that it is “...hard, and probably unnecessary to draw a boundary line between coordination and subordination”. For example, certain conjunctions are observed to head both coordinate and subordinate clauses (the most relevant for this study being causal כי). While progress has been made in describing the characteristics distinguishing these divergent uses, there is much room for refinement. Specifically, a theoretically grounded account is still lacking for what makes such conjunctions coordinate or subordinate, which can then be leveraged heuristically in the analysis of the clause complex and descriptively in grammatical treatments.
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004402911/BP000004.xml
G. Kotzé, C. Locatell, and J. Messara (eds), Ancient Texts and Modern Readers: Studies in Ancient Hebrew Linguistics and Bible Translation. Studia Semitica Neerlandica, 71. Leiden: Brill, 2019
The chapters in this volume address a variety of topics that pertain to modern readers’ understan... more The chapters in this volume address a variety of topics that pertain to modern readers’ understanding of ancient texts, as well as tools or resources that can facilitate contemporary audiences’ interpretation of these ancient writings, and their language. In this regard, they celebrate the contributions of Christo H.J. van der Merwe to the interrelated fields of ancient Hebrew linguistics, biblical interpretation, and Bible translation. Christo is professor of Hebrew language, literature, and translation studies in the department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. In the con- text of this department, ancient languages and cultures are studied not only for their own sake, but also for the relevance they hold for contemporary communities (especially, but not exclusively, in South Africa). This approach raises important and interesting challenges for research on, and teaching of, ancient languages and cultures. Two separate, but related questions with which the department is confronted require continual rethinking. These are, first, how best to understand what ancient cultural artifacts, such as literary and documentary writings, visual media (e.g., statues, stelae, stamp and cylinder seals, reliefs, etc.), and the material culture unearthed by archaeologists, communicate about the ideas, worldviews, customs, behaviour, beliefs, convictions, and living conditions of ancient peoples, and, second, how to most effectively communicate this knowledge to modern audiences and help them to acquire the requisite critical skills to interpret the primary sources in a responsible and an accountable manner.
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004402911/BP000001.xml
Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics
Cognitive and generative approaches to linguistics have taken a different perspective on grammati... more Cognitive and generative approaches to linguistics have taken a different perspective on grammatical polysemy and grammaticalization. While the former see polysemy as a core characteristic of language and a necessary result of grammaticalization within idiolects, the latter see it as a less interesting phenomenon peripheral to linguistics proper. Grammaticalization is seen as a phenomenon of language acquisition which does not disturb the homogeneity of idiolects. These differing perspectives have generated much debate between the two approaches and are even in large part responsible for the different programmatic focuses of each. While the disagreement over grammatical polysemy between these two approaches to language is rooted in entrenched commitments on each side that are perhaps irreconcilable, at least some common ground does seem to be possible. Specifically, when it comes to inter-generational corpora, it seems that both cognitive and generative approaches to linguistics can agree that the universal phenomenon of grammaticalization would result in polysemy at least at the language community level. This can serve as a common ground on which both generative and cognitive linguists can join efforts in describing and explaining usage profiles of grammatically polysemous forms at the corpus level according to prototypicality, even if disagreement persists on the nature of the idiolect.
The challenge of reconciling a verbal form's variety of senses on the one hand and its conceptual... more The challenge of reconciling a verbal form's variety of senses on the one hand and its conceptual coherence on the other is solved, not by positing a highly abstract, semantically invariant core from which each use is derived, nor by simply constructing taxonomies of contextually conditioned senses with " exceptions. " Rather a form's senses can be arranged diachronically along cross-linguistically consistent and cognitively motivated paths of change from which it becomes apparent that each sense has a direct conceptual relation only to adjacent senses on the path of change. These senses are synchronically organized in terms of prototypicality and fall along a semantic-pragmatic continuum according to conventionalization. Furthermore, senses previously thought of as " exceptional " are also conceptually related, but only indirectly via their common relationship to the overarching path of change. (Article)
Journal of Translation, 2015
Biblical Hebrew (BH) poetry poses unique challenges to translators and exegetes because of its of... more Biblical Hebrew (BH) poetry poses unique challenges to translators and exegetes because of its often complex textual development, its defamiliarized mode of communication, and its understudied relationship to its co-text. While a comprehensive analysis is welcomed for any discourse type, the unique challenges of BH poetry call for a holistic approach that marshals insights from the extra-linguistic setting, co-text, and multifaceted discourse features. The method of discourse analysis proposed by Wendland (1994) seems to provide a helpful framework for such investigation. Applying this approach to Psalm 70—a short, but incredibly multifaceted text—reveals the value of this sort of comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis. Additionally, following the application of Lambrecht’s (1994) theory of information structure (IS) to BH by Van der Merwe et al. (forthcoming), I propose that the Psalms may use parallel word order variation patterns beyond their IS purposes to create coherence relations at the discourse level.
Scriptura, 2015
The promise of Jeremiah 31:34 that “all of them will know me, from the least of them to the great... more The promise of Jeremiah 31:34 that “all of them will know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them” has been of crucial importance for the paedo- vs. credobaptism debate. However, there has been little discussion of what the quantifier means based on Jeremiah’s repeated and thematically linked uses. Throughout his prophecy, Jeremiah consistently uses this quantifier in reference to a group about which something is pervasively, though not exhaustively, true. Therefore, the quantifier in Jeremiah 31:34 should not be understood as presenting subjective knowledge of the Lord as the necessary condition of New Covenant membership to the exclusion of infant membership in that community and infant baptism as the sign of membership.
Books by Christian Locatell
The chapters in this volume were written in honor of Dr. William Varner’s decades of service and ... more The chapters in this volume were written in honor of Dr. William Varner’s decades of service and teaching in the church and the academy. Because of the breadth of Dr. Varner’s academic engagement, the contributors cover a variety of subjects including linguistics, exegesis, theology, intertextuality, textual criticism of Old and New Testament texts, early Christian literature, and the land of the Bible. Many contributors follow Dr. Varner’s lead in exploring and developing the relationship between several of these topics at once. With essays focusing on theoretical foundations for approaching Scripture and on concrete applications of particular texts, this volume yields just some of the fruit of Dr. Varner’s labor and demonstrates its applicability both in the academy and in the church.
Studia Semitica Neerlandica 71, Brill, 2019
The ever-widening gap that separates ancient texts from modern readers presents a perennial chall... more The ever-widening gap that separates ancient texts from modern readers presents a perennial challenge, which by its very nature necessitates a continual return to the sources and their conceptual worlds. To that end, this volume contains chapters on ancient Hebrew linguistics and Bible translation that con- tribute to modern readers’ understanding of ancient texts. The chapters treat different topics, but share an interest in theoretical and practical tools that may make the ancient texts’ language and conceptual worlds more accessible to modern readers. They use these theoretical and practical tools, as well as comparable data from other ancient texts or cultures, to elucidate aspects of ancient Hebrew literature. In this way, they do not only make contributions to modern readers’ understanding of ancient texts, but also present novel interpretations and identify some new lines of inquiry in the fields of ancient Hebrew linguistics and Bible translation. Each chapter presents the results of original research and all of them were subjected to extensive peer-review. The volume’s target audience includes specialists in ancient Hebrew, linguists, and Bible translators, but other scholars who endeavour to help modern readers better understand the ancient texts may also benefit from the discussions, analyses, and conclusions in the chapters.
We wish to thank all the authors for their contributions to this volume. Many other colleagues have supported this project in different ways, but we would like to make special mention of Prof. Izak Cornelius, Prof. Pierre van Hecke, Dr Steve Runge, and Dr Josh Westbury.
A special word of thanks goes to Prof. Dr Klaas Smelik for accepting the volume as part of the Studia Semitica Neerlandica series. We are especially grateful to Elisa Perotti and the team at Brill for their help during the publication pro- cess.
It is a great pleasure to dedicate this volume to Prof. Dr Christo H.J. van der Merwe, who, through his teaching, mentorship, writings, and work in translation, has demonstrated that sound scholarship, grounded in good theoretical insights, is indispensable for the interpretation and translation of the ancient texts in the Hebrew Bible for the benefit of modern readers.
https://brill.com/view/title/55137?lang=en
Book Reviews by Christian Locatell
Journal of Semitic Studies 66, 2021
REVIEWS e15 būnu 'features, appearance', pūṣu 'white spot'; it only proves that the Hebrew word i... more REVIEWS e15 būnu 'features, appearance', pūṣu 'white spot'; it only proves that the Hebrew word is a loan from Akkadian. pannaḡ (a type of bread, p. 178). Probably non-Semitic, but the occurrence of this noun in Old Babylonian lexical lists makes a North Mesopotamian origin less certain. The Akkadian variant pangu is based on one faulty reading of a Middle Assyrian text. ṣåḇ (a type of wagon, pp. 188-89). The variants ṣumbu ~ ṣubbu in Akkadian are no reason in themselves to assume a foreign word. Rather, it may be a case of nasalization of /bb/ > /mb/ as found in zumbu (zunbu) 'fly' < zubbu < from Proto-Semitic *ḏVb(V)b-. If this is correct, the variations seen in Elamite zù-um-bu, zu-um-bu and zù-ub-bu suggest that these are loanwords from Akkadian. šopår (an instrument made from an animal horn, pp. 212-13). This word is discussed extensively by Militarev, and Kogan, Semitic Etymological Dictionary, 271-3. š/siryōn 'scale armour, scale mail' (pp. 213-14). A clear case of a foreign word, however pace Noonan, it lacks a Hurrian etymology, making it impossible to determine the source language accurately, see Richter, Bibliographisches Glossar, 357-9. Archaeological evidence for this item from Nuzi cannot replace the lack of linguistic evidence. Furthermore, alternative source languages are readily available, the-am suffix on the Akkadian cognate si/ariyam might suggest a loanword from Kassite, see L. Sassmannshausen, 'Kassite Nomands: Fact or Fiction?', in C. Nicolle (ed.), Amurru 3: Nomades et sédentaires dans le Proche-Orient ancient (Paris 2004), 287-305, p. 290 n. 23. t-r-g-m 'to translate' (pp. 226-7). One of the clearest cases of a loanword from the Anatolian languages transmitted through Akkadian and adopted in the Old Assyrian period. It is doubtful whether Luwian was the donor language, as contact between Luwian speakers and the Assyrian population is uncertain, see A. Kloekhorst, Kanišite Hittite (HdO 132, Leiden and Boston 2019), 50. This volume is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. The topic of the book, Biblical Hebrew (BH) transitivity
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Articles by Christian Locatell
https://doi.org/10.1163/17455227-bja10030
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0250.19.pdf
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004402911/BP000004.xml
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004402911/BP000001.xml
Books by Christian Locatell
We wish to thank all the authors for their contributions to this volume. Many other colleagues have supported this project in different ways, but we would like to make special mention of Prof. Izak Cornelius, Prof. Pierre van Hecke, Dr Steve Runge, and Dr Josh Westbury.
A special word of thanks goes to Prof. Dr Klaas Smelik for accepting the volume as part of the Studia Semitica Neerlandica series. We are especially grateful to Elisa Perotti and the team at Brill for their help during the publication pro- cess.
It is a great pleasure to dedicate this volume to Prof. Dr Christo H.J. van der Merwe, who, through his teaching, mentorship, writings, and work in translation, has demonstrated that sound scholarship, grounded in good theoretical insights, is indispensable for the interpretation and translation of the ancient texts in the Hebrew Bible for the benefit of modern readers.
https://brill.com/view/title/55137?lang=en
Book Reviews by Christian Locatell
https://doi.org/10.1163/17455227-bja10030
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0250.19.pdf
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004402911/BP000004.xml
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004402911/BP000001.xml
We wish to thank all the authors for their contributions to this volume. Many other colleagues have supported this project in different ways, but we would like to make special mention of Prof. Izak Cornelius, Prof. Pierre van Hecke, Dr Steve Runge, and Dr Josh Westbury.
A special word of thanks goes to Prof. Dr Klaas Smelik for accepting the volume as part of the Studia Semitica Neerlandica series. We are especially grateful to Elisa Perotti and the team at Brill for their help during the publication pro- cess.
It is a great pleasure to dedicate this volume to Prof. Dr Christo H.J. van der Merwe, who, through his teaching, mentorship, writings, and work in translation, has demonstrated that sound scholarship, grounded in good theoretical insights, is indispensable for the interpretation and translation of the ancient texts in the Hebrew Bible for the benefit of modern readers.
https://brill.com/view/title/55137?lang=en
This is the initial submission of the 2012 LBD entry on the Letter to the Romans. The published version differed in some sections. The 2015 edition of this entry in the Lexham Bible Dictionary, by Andrew Das, was based in part on my 2012 article. You can find the 2015 version here: http://biblia.com/books/lbd/article/ROMANS.2C$5FLETTER$5FTO$5FTHE
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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 have principled effects 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 maintains its 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.