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.
Si!bawayhi regarding the role of xabar ka4na in constructions in which ka4na is a copula. According to Levin, Si!bawayhi finds many similarities between the role of xabar ka4na and a direct object after a transitive verb. Considering this view, and the fact that a predicate cannot also be an object, one should not understand the term xabar when employed after ka4na in Si!bawayhis writings as a regular verbal predicate. Si!bawayhi himself regards this xabar as parallel to several other structures, including a second object of verbs of )af(a!l al-qulu!b, which take two objects related to each other as subject and predicate and to a subject and predicate of a nominal sentence 15. The two objects of )af(a!l al-qulu!b and subject and predicate of a nominal sentence actually are in functional grammar terms topic and comment 16. Thus, this view suits the thesis suggested here, that the accusative member following )illa! in affirmative sentences is parallel to xabar ka4na not only in using the accusative but in being similar to a second object of )af(a!l al-qulu!b or to a predicate of a nominal sentence. In functional grammar terms this accusative member is a comment.
IV.
Finally, one more structure is relevant to this discussion. Another structure that makes the comment of a sentence syntactically prominent is a cleft sentence 17. In this type the comment actually takes a position of a predicate in a nominal sentence by putting the verbal predicate in a subordinate clause. The clause itself takes the position of the subject. Therefore, contrary to exceptive phrases or to extrapositional phrases, which might be considered appositions or comments for the former and topics for the latter, cleft sentences are transparent constructions in terms of functional grammar, eliminating doubts about the role of their components.
Nevertheless, cleft sentences are mentioned here for the sake of presenting a more complete picture of syntactical structures reflecting the functional structure of a sentence in terms of topic and comment. In this picture, on the one hand stand extrapositions, in which the topic is isolated, and on the other stand both exceptive sentences and cleft sentences, in which the comment is isolated.