בעיני + צ"ש" בלשון המקרא: תיאור המעריך

The combination of בעיני + NP appears in the Bible 327 times. In it's basic meaning, denotes a place or a medium, although considerable shifts in meaning have occurred in it, and in some cases it is used in a syntactical structure denoting the evaluation or perception of the speaker. It is a non-factive predicate, that is a predicate that does not presuppose the truth of the embedded proposition. Sometimes it even implies the untruth of the embedded proposition and may expressly indicate someone else's false perception, contrasted with the perception of the speaker, which is presented as true. בעיני + NP demonstrates a clear tendency to occur in sentences in which the predicate is an adjective. Even when the predicate is a verb, in most cases it is an adjectival verb. This tendency is apparently related to the fact that adjectives often have more of a judgmental and evaluative nature than any other grammatical category. The syntactical status of בעיני + NP is that of a sentence modifier. Its scope includes the entire sentence, although it is less parenthetical than obvious parenthetical utterances, such as לדעתי (In my opinion"). Consequently, this paper suggests that it be included in the category of sentence adverbials.