The Conditioning of Stress Position in Wa W Consecutive Perfect Forms in Biblical Hebrew

I. This paper attempts to add some further details to our understanding of the position of the word stress in waw consecutive perfect forms in biblical Hebrew, which remains incomplete in several areas. 1 Distinctive stress position occurs only in first person singular ( lcs) and second person masculine singular (2ms) forms. That it does not occur in first person plural forms is perhaps due to the influence of the penultimate stressing typical of that pronoun elsewhere and/ or the fact that stress was less likely to shift to u than to other vowels in final position. 2 In other perfect forms ending in vowels (3fs, 3pl) stress is final in contextual position, penultimate in pause in most forms, whether used with waw consecutive or no. Forms from hollow or geminate roots, or the hipcil stem, where this is not so, show a tendency to final stress which is also not connected with the waw consecutive function. 3 Consequently the following discussion is restricted to lcs and 2ms forms.