The development of the origin sense of the preposition מִן in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract

The origin sense of the preposition מִן in Biblical Hebrew has been treated in various ways by traditional grammars and lexica. The discrepancy between the entries for מִן in these sources indicates that a systematic and theoretically justifiable account of the nature of this sense was lacking. In this paper the Principled Polysemy Approach (Tyler and Evans 2013) was employed to analyse the origin sense (as defined) by investigating whether 1) it should be viewed as a distinct sense and 2) how is it related to the primary sense and the other senses of the preposition. The conclusion is reached that the origin sense is a distinct sense of the preposition and that it is related to the primary sense, which contains the semantic elements of locational source and separation, in a principled way.