The imperative-hortative paradigm in Biblical Hebrew in typological and diachronic view

In this paper, applying the cross-linguistic criterion of formal homogeneity, I represent the morphological properties of the imperative-hortative paradigm (volitive modals) in classical Biblical Hebrew: each personal form is marked individually; the 1st person hortative (traditionally called cohortative) has two freely distributed spelling variants, with and without the ending ; the 2nd person (imperative) has two contrasted forms—the basic one and one marked by the ending ; the 3rd person (jussive) has just one allomorph. The imperative—hortative forms are not available in syntactic subordination, but they are used in different types of dependent clauses introduced by the conjunction w- “and”. One of the major hallmarks of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system is the influence of other paradigms—w-perfect, imperfect, and infinitive absolute—on the imperative-hortative paradigm. The linguistic diversity in the Biblical Hebrew corpus points to other types of the imperative-hortative paradigm that are explained in terms of the linguistic chronology—the archaic type and the late type of the imperative-hortative paradigm in Biblical Hebrew. In the conclusion, I will point to the circularity in the diachronic development of the volitive forms in Biblical Hebrew and to the correlation of the diachronic development with the cross-linguistic typology.