--- title: "Indirect Responses in Biblical Hebrew — Zewi 2026" description: "The paper looks at how Biblical Hebrew speakers reply to questions without using the expected answer form." authors: ["Tamar Zewi"] year: 2026 venue: "Folia Orientalia 49" source: "https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/7018" licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zewi-2026-indirect-responses-biblical-hebrew/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zewi-2026-indirect-responses-biblical-hebrew/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/5/) / Indirect Responses in Biblical Hebrew # Indirect Responses in Biblical Hebrew **Authors:** [Tamar Zewi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/tamar-zewi/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Folia Orientalia 49 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/7018) · [PDF](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/download/7018/5831) ## Summary The paper looks at how Biblical Hebrew speakers reply to questions without using the expected answer form. In Biblical Hebrew, a "yes" usually repeats the question's predicate and a "no" uses a negative word. An indirect response breaks this pattern. It is a syntactically independent utterance that still connects coherently to the question. Zewi takes ten examples from Classical Biblical Hebrew prose. They cover the three question types the language attests: yes/no questions, question-word (WH) questions and alternative questions. She analyses each pair with Halliday & Hasan's three cohesion devices: anaphora (by repetition or resumptive pronouns), substitution and ellipsis. She also separates coherence (functional connectedness) from cohesion (surface linking features). Examples include: - the Cushite's curse on the king's enemies, from which the king infers Absalom's death; - Jehoshaphat's set phrase pledging alliance; - Hagar giving a reason instead of a route. Nearly every pair shows at least one cohesion device. Indirect replies are most visible after WH-questions. The study shows that implicit answers remain traceable through identifiable formal links. ## Key points - The corpus has ten question–response pairs from Classical Biblical Hebrew prose, e.g. 2 Sam 18, 1 Kgs 22:4 (cf. 2 Kgs 3:7), Gen 16:8 and 2 Kgs 9:11. - The framework uses Halliday & Hasan's cohesion devices (anaphora, substitution, ellipsis) and Crystal's coherence/cohesion distinction. - Only one example relies on context alone. Four use one device and five combine two. - Anaphora (repetition or resumptive pronouns) is the most frequent device. Substitution appears in two examples (one more partially) and ellipsis in one. - Question-tag interrogatives do not occur in Biblical Hebrew. Indirect answers are most evident with WH-questions. ## Interesting ideas - Define the canonical answer pattern first, so any reply that departs from it (e.g. "yes" = repeating the predicate) is flagged as indirect and needs inference. — For Mova (frames): prag could hold a template of the expected reply per question type and route non-matching replies to implicature handling. - Even an indirect reply usually leaves a surface trace, such as a repeated noun, a pronoun mapped to the asker's person agreement, or a substitute noun; these traces can confirm that it really answers the question. — For Mova (frames): coreference could link pronouns and repeated lemmas across the turn boundary to confirm which question a reply addresses before inferring its polarity. - A wish or curse such as "may my enemies be like X" can carry the answer polarity about X, and a statement of reason can stand in for a requested place. — For Mova (world): the world model could update X's state (e.g. dead or harmed) from such comparison-wishes, and record the reason as an answer to "where/why". - Separate deep coherence from surface cohesion, and count the cases where coherence rests on context alone as the hardest category. — For Mova (learn): evaluation could keep a held-out "context-only" subset of indirect answers as a stress test, since those cases cannot be resolved by surface links. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Coreference resolution](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/coreference-resolution/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{zewi2026indirect, title = {{Indirect Responses in Biblical Hebrew}}, author = {Zewi, Tamar}, booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 49}, year = {2026}, url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/7018} } ``` - [← previous IndigiEval: Evaluating LLMs in North American Indigenous Languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mainzinger-2026-indigieval-evaluating-llms-north-american/) - [next → Information Asymmetry across Language Varieties: A Case Study on Cantonese-Mandarin and Bavarian-German QA](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/pei-2026-information-asymmetry-across-language-varieties/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/5/)