2 - Major Rules of Hebrew Accents

Summary

Chapter Two investigates the hierarchy and dichotomy rules that govern the function of the disjunctive accents as well as the features of the final disjunctives. Disjunctive accents function as separators in the hierarchical order, whereas conjunctives serve as connectors between disjunctive accents. The disjunctive force of a disjunctive accent is relative to the context, but the hierarchical order among the disjunctive accents is almost absolute within a verse. The dichotomy rule states that a domain governed by a disjunctive accent is divided by other disjunctive accents of a grade below in a dichotomic way. In light of the dichotomy rule, it is helpful to divide the disjunctive accents in terms of four different levels ranging from D0 to D3. The level 0 accent indicates the strongest major break found in the verse, whereas the level 3 accent indicates the weakest. It is important to learn how to diagram a Hebrew verse by using these two rules. The three steps presented for diagramming are: 1) determine all the disjunctive accents in a given verse, 2) group the disjunctive accents according to their hierarchical level from D0 to D3, and 3) draw a dividing line for each domain.