26 research outputs found
The documents in the first book of the Maccabees and the foreign policy of the Maccabees
This thesis is a re-examination of the documents in 1 Maccabees, which have been the subject of much previous comment. Section 1 is a survey of previous work followed by a discussion of methods. Section 2 deals with the historic background and Section 3 contains detailed commentaries on the texts of the documents. The conclusion is arrived at that, except for the letter of Jonathan to the Spartans, the documents are genuine, and that, when allowance is made for Hebraisms they conform to the pattern of Hellenistic documents. The Seleucid documents provide valuable information on the status of Judaea under Seleucid rule and the issues in the conflict between the Maccabees and the Seleucids. The Roman letters are shown to be designed partly to support the Maccabees1 aspirations for independence, partly to consolidate their rule among the Jewish communities of the Diaspora. The Spartan letter is of minor importance. The decree in honour of Simon illustrates the nature of the new Maccabean High Priesthood. Taken together, the letters serve as a valuable guide to the policy, especially the foreign policy of the Maccabees.<p
Optional and obligatory verbal complements in English.
This thesis investigates the factors that determine whether complements marked in the subcategorization of verbs are obligatory or optional. The model used is that of Chomsky (1965). In 1.1, the notion of verbal complement is defined and is limited to direct objects, indirect objects, prepositional objects, directionals and some locatives; 1.2, consists largely of a resume of past discussions that have a bearing on the main topic of this investigation. It emerges that a distinction must be drawn between the absence of unspecified and specified complements. Chapter 2 deals with the omission of unspecified complements, 3 with the omission of specified complements that consist of simple noun phrases. Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the status of sentential complements and the structure of sentences containing such complements; the rest of the chapter deals with the omission of the various types of sentential complements. Chapter 5 deals with the omission of reflexive and reciprocal pronouns. Chapter 6 discusses how the phenomena described in Chapters 2--5 should be handled by a grammar. The conclusion is reached that verbs that can be used without specified complements should be subcategorized as taking optional complements, so that there is no need to account for the absence of unspecified complements by a deletion transformation. Such a transformation is, however, necessary to account for the absence of specified complements. The main body of the thesis is followed by three Appendixes
Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs
The papers collected in this book cover contemporary and original research on semantic and grammatical issues of nouns and noun phrases, verbs and sentences, and aspects of the combination of nouns and verbs, in a great variety of languages. A special focus is put on noun types, tense and aspect semantics, granularity of verb meaning, and subcompositionality. The investigated languages and language groups include Austronesian, East Asian, Slavic, German, English, Hungarian and Lakhota. The collection provided in this book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students specialising in the fields of semantics, morphology, syntax, typology, and cognitive sciences
Types and Meanings in Intensionality, Selection and Quantifier Scope
in the faculty of Computer Science. Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am indebted to Yoad Winter. Yoad is everything one would expect to find in an advisor and a teacher, and much more than this. Yoad is the one who introduced me to the field of natural language semantics. His optimism and encouragement, together with the endless discussions and iterations we had, made the completion of this thesis possible. Special thanks to Nissim Francez for the time and effort he put into Chapter 3, which is based on a conference paper we published together, and for his thorough remarks on the material in the other chapters. Nissim, as a teacher, has initiated my interest in Categorial Grammars and Proof Theory. Thanks also to the other members in my PhD committee, Johann Makowsky and Ariel Cohen, for their illuminating remarks. I am grateful to Shalom Lappin, Ed Keenan, Johann Makowsky, and especially to Ya’acov Peterzil, for their remarks on the material in Chapter 4