Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Matthew Anstey wrote:


>Dear Rolf
>
>Rolf, in your analysis of Psalm 18 and the other passage, you talk about
>past, present, and future time. Would your analysis be more precise if you
>used Speech Time, Event Time, and Reference Time, as recent works such as
>Goldfajn have done? Goldfajn solves many temporal conundrums by using this
>(Reichenbachian) system. I think you have mentioned Deictic Time before, but
>I am not aware of this term or its relationship to ST, ET, and RT.
>
>With regards,
>Matthew
>

Dear Matthew,

Thank you for your post and even more for your post a month ago "Re: Rolf,
logic, and the Bible". You went away for three weeks and nobody commented
on it. I put it in my out-box in order to comment on it in time.  It was
very thought-provoking!  I will come back to it, but I am extremely busy at
present ( for the first time at a Norwegian university, we have started a
course in Sumerian, and that takes time).

In the thread  "tense-aspect-mood (was: scient. meth.)" at the beginning of
January I used your terms, and they are particularly important when we
discuss the relationship between tense and aspect, and when we are going to
discuss whether aspect is "the internal temporal constituency" of an event,
as Comrie defines it (I don't think this definition fits Hebrew).

Mary Broman Olsen has in her thesis eliminated the Reichenbachian and
Comrian difference between absolute and relative time, and claims that much
of what have been ascribed to relative time should be ascribed to aspect.
As to English, she seems to have a point here. In my vocabulary, "tense"
means a grammaticalization of past, present or future time, i.e. the
particular time ascribed to a verb form is semantic ( an uncancellable part
of the verb) and not only conversational pragmatic implicature. In order
not to introduce any kind of grammaticalization into my argument, I use
past, present, and future time. The advantage of these terms is that they
are general, they are not connected with any system of thought, but they
can be grasped by simple intuition, and they convey my point, that there
are huge problems with the traditional tense interpretation of wayyiqtol.

I am engaged in a project where the Hebrew verbal system is studied in
depth. Here the terms you mention are used, particularly when we try to
show that Hebrew aspect has nothing to do with time, as aspect has in
English. But honestly speaking, I find Broman Olsen's model much better
than Reichenbach's.


Regards
Rolf


Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo