This dissertation investigates switches in verbal grams between the Biblical Hebrew (BH) suffix- and prefix-conjugation in the book of Psalms. The study of the BH verbal system has a long history, but since most studies pre-date modern findings within the fields of language typology and comparative Semitic studies, a survey is first made of the inventory of the BH verbal grams and their development. Support is found for the three distinct inherited finite grams Vsuff, VprefS (short) and VprefL (long), as well as the contingent grams waC-Vpref and we-Vsuff. There is clearly an aspectual opposition between perfective Vsuff and imperfective Vpref, but since the TAM-categories are non-discrete and interwoven, verbal grams are better described in terms of TAM-ranges, rather than as having a ‘basic’ semantic meaning. 

Clause combining is more than the sum of combined clauses and so the semantics of clause combining is considered from a typological perspective. It is found that syntactic representation as dependent or independent is largely a choice of rhetorical presentation, not one of semantic necessity. The switching of verbal grams is found to effect dependency linking in BH, both on a clause level and on the discourse level of grounding. Both VprefL and Vsuff serve as digressions from the mainline.

The concept of ‘parallelism’ and the use of diverse discourse types are distinguishing features of poetry, yet the notion of text-progression through a mainline with digressions holds across both prose and poetry. These digressions can be seen as clause dependency linking, referred to as hypotactic clause combining (HCC). Most commonly Vpref is seen to provide non-mainline circumstantial information to a Vsuff mainline. Switches between Vpref and Vsuff in corresponding ‘synonymous’ lines of poetry are shown to have a close resemblance to circumstantial clause combining, with both types having in common a single event communicated with two clauses.