[b-hebrew] b-hebrew Uncancellable meaning and Hebrew verbs
Rolf Furuli
furuli at online.no
Tue Jul 7 11:18:28 EDT 2009
>
>
>As I argued in my review, the examples of wayyiqtol you present as
>demonstrating that wayyiqtol is imperfective are better taken as
>non-prototypical rather than demonstrating what the uncancellable
>semantics of the form are. You have yet to counter this argument and
>demonstrate why such minority of examples are wholly diagnostic of the
>majority use of wayyiqtol. That you refuse to show how common examples
>like wayyo'mer in Gen 12:1 can be taken as instantiating imperfective
>aspect shows to me that the theory is upside down: better to take
>majority of function as prototypical, which then allows for
>non-prototypical examples like some present tense use or imperfective
>use etc.
>
>Regards,
>David Kummerow.
>
It is possible to approach the BH verbal system
in many ways, by the prototypical method, by
discourse analysis, by a grammaticalization
approach, and by a method that distinguishes
between semantics and pragmatics. Every method
has of course its advantages and disadvantages.
My personal concerns relate to the lack of
controls of most methods, to the point where
almost everything goes. One can simply say
without any particular data (if I understand the
method correctly) that "this form is
non-prototypical" because it is different from
the majority of similar forms. I would like to
refer to some examples.
The so-called "prophetic perfect" is a good
example. In the 19th century (and in many cases
also today) scholars viewed QATAL as the
perfective aspect with the meaning "completed
action". In the 19th century scholars ( for
example A. B. Davidson) realized that many QATALs
had future reference. When this was the case (I
list 965 examples of QATAL with future
meaning-not including future perfect), the action
still *had to be* completed. So when it factually
was not completed, it was postulated that it was
completed in the mind of the prophet! This is an
ad hoc-explanation in order to save the
definition of QATAL. I go in the very opposite
direction by arguing that prophetic perfect is a
fiction, and that the 965 QATALs do have real
future reference.
Other interesting examples of how far scholars go
in order to save their theory, are the writings
of H. Birkeland and F. R. Blake. For 40 years
until the mid-1960s Harris Birkeland was
professor of Semitics at the University of Oslo.
He believed that WAYYIQTOL represented past
tense, and I was taught that when I started my
Hebrew studies. Another outstanding Semitic
scholar in the 40s and 50s was F. R. Blake, who
just as strongly as Birkeland defended the past
tense meaning of WAYYIQTOL. In their writings
(Birkeland (1935) "Ist das hebräische Imperfektum
consecutiv ein Präteritum?" Acta Orient VIII; F.
R. Blake (1951) "A Resurvey of the Hebrew Tenses
With and Appendix") they both discussed the same
about 125 particular WAYYIQTOLs seemingly with
non-past reference, and both concluded that these
were not counterexamples against the view that
WAYYIQTOL represented past tense. What is
interesting, however, are their arguments. Blake
argued that most of the examples really had
non-past reference, but they were wrongly pointed
by the Masoretes and were actually copulative
imperfects. Birkeland accepted that they were
correctly pointed and by the help of some
linguistic acrobatics, he took them to have past
reference. Both *knew* that WAYYIQTOL represented
past tense, and this had to be defended with all
means.
>Then this just means that you read back the meaning of the minority of
>uses into the majority of uses. But how do we know that the semantic
>meaning of the majority of uses wasn't in part cancelled to allow for
>the minority of uses? How do we know that the meaning found in the
>minority of uses is also by default to be attributed to the majority of
>uses. Here work on frequency in linguistics would tell against your
position as I argued in my review.
If we are concerned with temporal reference, the
situation is very clear, because the deictic
center and reference time is visible in most
verbs. The only possible candidate for tense is
WAYYIQTOL, and because the almost one thousand
examples with non-past reference occur in normal
contexts and by no means can be viewed as special
cases, they strongly argue against a past tense
interpretation. The reason for the great number
of WAYYIQTOLs with past reference, is the big
place of narrative texts in the BH, and here the
verbs must have past reference.
If we are concerned with aspect, it is absolutely
wrong to speak of "the majority of uses" and "the
minority of uses". This is so because in most
verbs we simply cannot see the relationship
between event time and reference time, so we
cannot know their aspect (one needs clairvoyance
to do so). Therefore we must analyze the verbs
where this relationship can be seen. And in these
cases we see that both WAYYIQTOL and YIQTOL have
imperfective characteristics and QATAL and
WEQATAL have perfective characteristics. Here
there is no majority and minority!
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli
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