Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] The perspective of this native speaker of Modern Hebrew of Biblical Hebrew tenses

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] The perspective of this native speaker of Modern Hebrew of Biblical Hebrew tenses
  • Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 21:44:47 +0100

Dear Dave,

Thank you for your post. See my comments below.

Dave Washburn wrote:

On Saturday 27 November 2004 02:07, Rolf Furuli wrote:

Rolf,
[snip]

It is true that Indo-European scholars have imposed upon classical
Hebrew their definitions of aspect, but it is my impression that most
modern Israeli scholars have done exactly the same, not with aspect,
which they reject, but with tense. When you say that the
perfective/imperfective distinction work about half the time, you are
correct. But note that this is when you apply English aspectual
distinctions to classical Hebrew. And this is a cardinal error in
Hebrew studies, to assume that aspect is one and the same thing in all
aspectual languages, namely, the opposition incomplete/completed or
incomplete/complete! I am not aware of a singly scholarly study that
presents a different view.


Then you haven't read either my paper (Hebrew Studies 1994) or Galia Hatav's monograph, because we both take different views. Hers in particular addresses your questions about aspect, R-time, and all the rest. While I don't agree with her in all respects, I found her approach to be a real breath of fresh air, and was able to make some modifications of my own theory based on it.

snip

In any case, I heartily commend Galia Hatav's book to you as you continue your thought-provoking research.


I should have stressed in my words above that I spoke about new *definitions* (semantic meaning) of the aspects different from "incomplete/completed" and "incomplete/complete", and not about new or adjusted *uses* (conversational pragmatic implicture). I have a copy of Galia's paper in my library, and in my dissertation I argue against her view that a WAYYIQTOL always give a new R-time (The same is done by J. A. Cook, 2002). While Galia present different new viewpoints, she does not present a new definition of the aspects.

A big advantage of her study is that she distinguishes between aspect and Aktionsart (p. 2), something which Comrie, on whom she often leans does not do. This is very fine. Regarding aspect she says (p. 6):
"The aspect, on the other hand, plays a major role in the verbal system of BH. Thus the crucial temporal relations in BH are those holding between the situations and their R-times. The aspects will define: a) sequentiality; b) inclusion (=progressive); and c) perfect." If I understand her correctly, b) is almost identical with "incomplete," and c) is almost identical with "completed" (though she mentions the "parasitic" use of QATAL, p. 9). True, she stresses sequentiality, but this is a pragmatic and not a semantic property. She also stresses modality, but that is something in addition to b) and c) and does not invalidate these two points. Others who define the aspects as "incomplete/completed" make use of modality as well.

Galia shows that English may use tenses where Hebrew uses aspects and says (p. 9): "To conclude, the English and BH perfects are not identical, but they both share the "parasitic" nature and many of the temporal and pragmatic functions." It is true that Galia argues that the *use* of the Hebrew aspects in some respects are different from the use in English. But I am not able to find a new definition of the meaning of the Hebrew aspects compared with the English ones in her work.


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page