Tripartite nominal sentences in Biblical Hebrew refer to those verbless nominal sentences that include a third constituent (usually a 3rd person pronoun or a demonstrative) in addition to a subject and a predicate. In the realm of Biblical Hebrew linguistics, the past 100 years have seen constant research on nominal sentences, and especially there are still differences among views of tripartite nominal sentences. At the center of the controversy lies the question of what the identity and roles of the third element other than the subject and the predicate, that is to say the third person pronoun or the demonstrative (let’s call this third element special pronoun) are in tripartite nominal sentences.
The first task of this study is to explicate whether the special pronoun in tripartite nominal sentences is a copula, and the second is to investigate what its identity and roles are if it is not a copula.
In order to grasp the identity and role of tripartite nominal sentences in Biblical Hebrew, this study attempts at systematic and critical research on the basis of precise and diverse statistical data (our data was based on 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 1 Chronicles, and 2 Chronicles). The results clarified that the special pronoun in tripartite nominal sentences cannot be a copula. This is because tripartite nominal sentences cannot be regarded as having the same properties as bipartite nominal sentences as the two are too different in many respects. It is also confirmed, as a result of this study, that views that regard the structure of tripartite nominal sentences as extraposition or ‘casus pendens" are difficult to accept.
As a result of the investigation of the identity and roles of the special pronoun, i.e. the second task of this study, it is found to play two roles. Its first role is emphasis. Many of the researchers who mention emphasis regard the pronoun as emphasizing the subject, while only a few researchers say that it can emphasize the predicate as they take it to emphasize what is right in front of it. However, this study claims that the special pronoun emphasizes not only the subject and predicate but also the entire sentence in a tripartite nominal sentence. In tripartite nominal sentences, word order is not regularly determined, but diversified in accordance with degrees of the definiteness of the subject and predicate, and hence plays the role of emphasizing the entire sentence.
The second role is balancing the subject and the predicate. Like weights of a scale, the special pronoun plays the role of lifting the entire sentence while balancing the subject and the predicate. That is to say, when the weights of the subject and the predicate are identical (their definiteness being the same), it lifts the two in the middle of them. On the other hand, when the weight of the subject is lighter than that of the predicate, it plays the role of lifting the two while helping the predicate with relatively weak definiteness.