The Syntax of Answers to Questions in the Bible in the Light of Conversation Analysis

The question-response unit, known as an adjacency pair in Conversation Analysis, is a complex social interaction involving potentially-competing interests, assumptions and points of view. Direct answers to questions may be full, with every syntactic constituent of the question overtly represented, or reduced, with one or more of these constituents deleted. Research in English and other languages has shown that reduced answers are the default, indicating a high level of cooperation with the speaker’s stances and agendas, while full answers involve some degree of resistance to the question. The present study examines whether this finding is valid for Biblical Hebrew (BH) as well. The syntax and pragmatics of answers in BH have received little attention, with the exception of E. L. Greenstein (“The syntax of saying `yes` in Biblical Hebrew”, JANES 1989, 19: 51-59), which analyzes the syntax of answers to yes/no questions. The corpus for the present study consists of the prose passages in Genesis-2 Kings. The direct answers to both yes/no and content questions in this corpus were categorized with respect to the syntactic form of the answer and the situational dynamic obtaining between the participants in the dialogue. Analysis of the data shows that reduced answers are the default and are nearly always cooperative in nature, while full answers usually indicate disapproval of the question or objection to its underlying agenda. An exception to this generalization is the free-form answer to an open-ended question such as “What did you do?”; such answers are cooperative despite their non-reduced form.