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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect

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  • From: Dave Washburn <davidlwashburn AT gmail.com>
  • To: "b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect
  • Date: Tue, 28 May 2013 19:00:44 -0700



On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:02 PM, Ken Penner <kpenner AT stfx.ca> wrote:
I hesitate to jump into this mess, but the comment from Ruth ("You would do better to listen to Rolf") prompted me to make a couple of notes.

I don't have a linguistics degree, but I've read enough linguistic literature for my PhD thesis (on Hebrew tense, aspect, and modality) to know that much of the discussion on this list would appear quite silly to a linguist. Rolf's view is highly idiosyncratic and does not interact with recent standard linguistic literature.

Ken beat me to it. I don't know of anybody here who has really delved into linguistics that buys Rolf's view. My own view maintains a strict separation between syntax and semantics. While it's still in some formative stages pending its developer getting off his big duff and doing more aggressive research, but here's the framework. It builds on two factors: realis vs irrealis mode (a la Galia Hatav) and syntactic connection vs lack thereof. Here's how it lays out:


Form                            realis                  syntactic connection

Qatal                              +                                +
Yiqtol                              -                                 +
Weqatal                          -                                 -
Wayyiqtol                       +                                 -

Both yiqtol and weqatal appear in future contexts because future is a subset of irrealis mode. A syntactic connection can be most anything, including subordination. But it's a structural connection, not a connection of "meaning."

I also exclude poetry from my syntactic endeavors. I've read poetry in 9 different languages, and in all of them, poetry has  a tendency to make its own "rules." A scholarly paper wouldn't use a construction like "You am," whereas a poet just might find a use for it. This is the sort of thing that I think is going on in Karl's passage in Proverbs: the writer is playing with words and sounds, and uses a realis and an irrealis in the same verse. Why? Because he liked the sound of it. I don't believe we can gain any real syntactic knowledge from examining poetry. Actually, let me qualify that. If we know the language intimately, the way I know English, so that we already know how the syntax works in excruciating detail, then it's possible to examine poetry and appreciate the way it "broke the rules." But it's impossible to do that wit Hebrew since we still don't know what the "rules" are. How can I look at the playful way the author jerked his language around in passage X if I know nothing about what the language says it's "supposed" to be?

This is why I restrict my syntactic questions to prose. And so far, my admittedly-Chomskyan separation between syntax and semantics seems to be yielding some promising results. If I live long enough...


--
Dave Washburn

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