Main Clause Verbs are Prosodically Weaker than Nouns in the Tiberian Cantillation of Biblical Hebrew Prose Books

The study investigates the relationship between prosodic strength and word class in three prose Biblical Hebrew books (Genesis, Exodus and 1 Kings). At the morpheme level, prepositions and the object marker are found to be prosodically weakest, while nominal forms are prosodically strongest. Adverbs and verbs sit between these positions. At the syntactic level the relationship between surface word order and the strength of prosodic boundaries between high-level main clause constituents in sentences consisting of S, V, O and PP elements is considered. The deepest phonological divide in SVO sentences corresponds to the division between subject and predicate. In all other word orders, V is incorporated into the following prosodic phrase, regardless of the syntactic role of the constituent.  I propose that prosodic status, on the level of the word / morpheme is a function of the degree to which the morpheme contributes semantic, as opposed to grammatical, information.