Finding Missing Objects in Biblical Hebrew (with an Appendix on Missing Subjects)

Abstract

Missing object complements are significant for the grammar and the lexicon. An explanation is called for of their syntactic status, the basis for their “recovery” or interpretation in discourse, constrictions on what type of objects may be missing, and their information-structure status in the context of object marking more generally. In this essay I present a taxonomy of missing complements in Biblical Hebrew from the perspective of information structure, focusing especially on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic bases of their interpretation in the discourse. In an appendix I briefly explore the applicability of this taxonomy of missing objects to explain the interpretation of missing subjects in Biblical Hebrew discourse.