semantics of wayyiqtol/weqatal
Vincent DeCaen
decaen at chass.utoronto.ca
Tue Oct 16 18:01:31 EDT 2001
anyone out there into formal semantics? i've been trying to model the
consecutives in BH by playing with the propositional calculus. i believe
that the following must be the key:
"sequence": A, followed by B
FORM SEMANTICS?
english: A and B A & B
hebrew: A wayyiqtol B A <--> B
similarly weqatal as A --> B
what's interesting about this approach is the difference between english
and hebrew amounts to a morpheme virtually equivalent semantically to
"then". that seems to be the intuition consistent with the traditional
term "consecutive".
i believe, then, that this opens up a coherent model, incorporating
truth-functional operators (crucially, "and", "then"), mood, tense. i've
put together some notes if anyone wants to follow this up at
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/papers/truth_operators.doc
this is an MSWord.doc, if you have trouble with it, please let me know.
sholom,
V
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Dr Vincent DeCaen <decaen at chass.utoronto.ca>
c/o Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, 4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor
University of Toronto, Toronto ON, CANADA, M5S 1A1
Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative, www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/hsei/
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Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. --Dewey
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