Psalm 45 Discourse
Macrosyntax
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- V. 2b: The default word order is pronoun + participle:
"In nominal clauses with a participle verbal-nominal, the semantic agent of the verbal event is the primary topic. This semantic agent is either presupposed contextually or made explicit with a pronoun or nominal before the participle. The basic, unmarked word-order of such nominal clauses is (subject)-participle-complement (following Buth, 1999), with the explicit subject optional" (Floor, "From Information Structure, Topic and Focus, to Theme in Biblical Hebrew Narrative," Ph.D. diss. U of Stellenbosch, p. 82).
This verse has marked word-order, and the participle is placed before the subject to be focused in Predicate-Focus Structure. See also Gen 19:13; 29:9; 30:1; 31:5; 31:20; 32:12; Lev. 27:8; Num. 22:22; 25:18; Deut. 5:25; and 19:6 (Katsuomi Shimasaki, "Focus Structure in Biblical Hebrew: A Study of Word Order and Information Structure with Special Reference to Deuteronomy," Ph.D. diss., Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, 1999, p. 227 [link]).
- V. 3c: The discourse marker עַל־כֵּן, therefore, is anaphoric (referring back to what has previously been said in v. 3a–b); it is represented here as introducing the final clause of the paragraph; also v. 8c and v. 18b.
- V. 4: The vocative here is placed after the clause-nucleus. According to Miller (2010: 358), this placement is "to provide rhetorical highlighting, though of a less specific nature [than focus]."
- V. 5: poetic mirror-imaging with previous line; pragmatically topical.
- V. 7a: The vocative, אֱ֭לֹהִים is the second constituent, which may suggest the preceding entity, "your throne" (כִּסְאֲךָ֣) is focussed. (See Miller. 2010: 357).
- V. 8c: See comment on v. 3c.
- V. 9a, b: Marked focus to emphasise the luxurious nature of the king's apparel and surroundings (see also vv. 14–15).
- V. 11a: The vocative of direct address (previously unaddressed participant) introduces a new paragraph. Although a post-verbal vocative may draw attention/focus on the following sentence constituent (Kim 2022: 233-235), this is unlikely here since the next word begins a second imperative.
- V. 12b: The subordinate conjunction כִּי is read here as providing the grounds for the preceding imperatives (hear, see, incline your ear, forget) and associated aim (so that the king will desire your beauty). The כִּי thus provides the grounds for a directive speech act ("I instruct you to do these things because he is your husband").
- Vv. 14–15: Each clause has marked predicate focus, which has the effect of placing emphasis on the luxuriousness of the new bride's clothing and entourage. The repeated predicate focus also has the effect of creating cohesion within the poetic unit.
- V. 18b: See comment on v. 3c.
General observations
- There are 9 clause-level waws in this psalm, and all but 1 (v. 8b, which is line-medial) are part of a series of imperatives (or associated results).
- There is very little syntactic subordinate in this psalm.
Paragraph divisions
- V. 3: There is a shift here from the psalmist's introductory frame to the content of the ode itself. There is also a person shift, from speaking of the king in 3rd person to addressing him in 2nd person.
- V. 4: There is a shift here from indicative statements to a series of modal verbs. (The content also shifts from appearance and wisdom to military power.)
- V. 7: The vocative may help to set this section off as a new paragraph.
- V. 9 begins a new paragraph with two lines, each beginning with marked focus.
- V. 11: This paragraph is indicated by the direct address to the "daughter." Is has a series of imperatives and result clauses, connected by waws and a כִּי ("because").
- V 14 begins a new paragraph with a series of fronted marked focus (four lines). It also breaks the string of waws, which tie together vv. 11–13.
- V. 18: This final verse (bi-colon) is a concluding frame that corresponds to the introductory frame. As with the introduction, it speaks in first person.
Speech Act Analysis
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Affect Analysis
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- ↑ When the entire utterance is new/unexpected, it is a thetic sentence (often called "sentence focus"). See our Creator Guidelines for more information on topic and focus.
- ↑ Frame setters are any orientational constituent – typically, but not limited to, spatio-temporal adverbials – function to "limit the applicability of the main predication to a certain restricted domain" and "indicate the general type of information that can be given" in the clause nucleus (Krifka & Musan 2012: 31-32). In previous scholarship, they have been referred to as contextualizing constituents (see, e.g., Buth (1994), “Contextualizing Constituents as Topic, Non-Sequential Background and Dramatic Pause: Hebrew and Aramaic evidence,” in E. Engberg-Pedersen, L. Falster Jakobsen and L. Schack Rasmussen (eds.) Function and expression in Functional Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 215-231; Buth (2023), “Functional Grammar and the Pragmatics of Information Structure for Biblical Languages,” in W. A. Ross & E. Robar (eds.) Linguistic Theory and the Biblical Text. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 67-116), but this has been conflated with the function of topic. In brief: sentence topics, belonging to the clause nucleus, are the entity or event about which the clause provides a new predication; frame setters do not belong in the clause nucleus and rather provide a contextual orientation by which to understand the following clause.