Biblical Hebrew and Cognitive Linguistics: A General Orientation

The aim of this study is to enable scholars of Biblical Hebrew (BH) to orientate themselves as far as a substantial number of applications of cognitive linguistic (CL) insights into BH are concerned. The paper begins with a brief overview of CL, positioning it within the field of linguistics and describing its commitments and basic points of departure. This is followed by a bird’s eye view of the different schools of thought. The section concludes with a summary of current developments in CL and some of the widely acknowledged challenges. In the final section of the paper, the scope and the theoretical underpinnings of a range of applications of insights from CL to BH are profiled. One of the findings of this broad orientation is that a way to optimally use distributional data and statistical methods for establishing the different senses of linguistic expressions has yet to be established, whether in CL or BH.