[b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org
Wed Mar 7 07:53:08 EST 2007
On 07/03/2007 11:09, Rolf Furuli wrote:
> Dear Peter,
>
> Here you completely miss the mark! The point is as follows: All linguists
> know, and ordinary people know that some verbs can refer to the past because
> the verb forms themselves have an intrinsic past tense, and other verbs can
> in one context refer to the past and in other contexts to the future. This
> is absolutely not theory-dependent, since this is a fact that no one would
> dispute. ...
Rolf, I'm sorry, but I don't know this, neither as a linguist nor as an
ordinary person, and I do dispute it. As an ordinary person, I have no
conscious understanding of any distinctions of this sort, I simply use
and understand verbs and other parts of language. As a linguist, I am
aware that in some languages in many circumstances there are clear
distinctions of this kind, but I am also aware of examples where there
is no clear distinction, such as where a verb form which ordinarily has
a past meaning (in a loose sense of the word) can also be used in a
non-past way.
Your appeal to "All linguists know, and ordinary people know..." is a
double logical fallacy. The first, "All linguists know...", is an appeal
to authority fallacy, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority. The second, "ordinary
people know..." and repeated in "this is a fact that no one would
dispute" (even if these statements were true, which I don't accept), is
an "Argumentum ad populum" fallacy, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum. You have to prove
things like this, not assume them. If your theoretical model assumes
them, then it is an inadequate model.
--
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter at qaya.org
Blog: http://www.qaya.org/blog/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/
More information about the b-hebrew
mailing list