Tamar Zewi, «The Syntactical Status of Exceptive Phrases in Biblical Hebrew», Vol. 79 (1998) 542-548
Exceptive phrases are usually considered appositions to the sentence parts from which they are excepted. This paper considers the syntactical status of exceptive phrases from a functional point of view. It indicates the similarities between exceptive phrases, extrapositions and cleft sentences. It compares the Biblical construction of exceptive phrases to that of Classical Arabic, and learns important facts from the syntactical status of the parallel Arabic construction as reflected in the Arabic case system. Considering all the evidence, the paper asserts that exceptive phrases after negative sentences actually present the new information exhibited by the speaker or writer, that is, the logical predicate or the comment of the sentence.
Such a view also arises from many syntactical treatments of extraposition that regard extrapositional phrases in extrapositions as topics, and even use the term subject 8. By contrast, such syntactical definitions are usually not made regarding exceptive phrases, which are generally referred to as appositions and are not treated in terms of functional grammar. My suggestion is to consider exceptive phrases by the same means that consider extrapositions, namely those of functional grammar, and to see them as comments of the sentence to which they belong 9.
III.
Classical Arabic grammatical rules regarding exceptive phrases contribute more to the understanding of these constructions as comments. Classical Arabic employs case markings of syntactical positions for most sentence members. Extrapositional phrases, for instance, take nominative case marking, thus revealing, the inside view of Arabic grammar regarding their syntactical status, that is, topic, or in terms of Arabic grammar mubtada), of the whole sentence 10.