Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Dear Dave,

I think you had already adequately communicated to me at least that 
you hold to this principle, though I was glad of your clear statement 
of it. What you have failed to demonstrate is the correctness of this 
principle and its adequacy for study of verb forms of Biblical Hebrew, 
or for that matter of any other language.

I do not in fact want to criticise the correctness of this principle 
as far as it goes. With this principle, we can identify clauses which, 
taken in isolation, are grammatically correct in Hebrew; this would 
include clauses with X + qatal, weqatal, X + yiqtol, wayyiqtol, 
weyiqtol etc, but would rule out as ungrammatical clauses with 
non-existent verb forms such as *waqqatal. For this, there is no need 
for discourse analysis.

But I also see your principle as inadequate for describing which verb 
forms are appropriate in a particular context. Take this fragment from 
the start of an English discourse: "I got up at eight o'clock this 
morning. I take a shower and get dressed. Then I had some 
breakfast..." Is this good English or not? Each individual clause is 
grammatical. But the second sentence should read "I took a shower and 
got dressed.", because the discourse context is a single past event 
rather than present and habitual. Does your principle, and your 
grammatical approach as a whole, give a way of determining that this 
English discourse is ungrammatical? If not, I would suggest that it is 
inadequate, and unable to deal with the analogous questions in Hebrew 
of when to use which verb form.

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[3]: Qatal, 1 Kings 11:1
Author:  dwashbur AT nyx.net at internet
Date:    03/02/1999 08:05


<snip>

Yes, and therein lies one of my major differences with nearly 
everybody else here: I hold to the autonomous syntax principle. 
One recent statement of this principle says "No syntactic rule can 
make reference to pragmatic, phonological, or semantic 
information."  (Andrew Radford, *Transformational Grammar*, 
Cambridge U. Press, 1988 p. 31).  This is one of the chief
distinguishing features of transformational grammar, and one that I 
seem to have had trouble communicating here.

<snip>

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.