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b-hebrew - Re[6]: Qatal, 1 Kings 11:1

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  • From: Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG
  • To: dwashbur AT nyx.net, b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re[6]: Qatal, 1 Kings 11:1
  • Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 12:33:53 -0500 (EST)



Thank you for your clarification. I am still not quite clear why your
theory allows for English tenses to be restricted (though
non-syntactically, if I understand you correctly) by discourse context
(or higher than clause level context) but has problems with the same
approach for Hebrew. No doubt I need to go back to Chomsky etc before
commenting further.

One question still arises. You wrote: "...Within the bounds of regular
language, a verb form cannot be both X and opposite-of-X within a
single society's usage. Of course, someone will immediately throw the
NT Greek "historic present" at me, found profusely in Mark and other
places; the question there is, was this a construction that pretty
much all native Koine speakers considered "good" Greek, or was it an
occasional syntactic aberration that writers would sometimes use,
perhaps for the sake of effect (or something similar)?"

Are you saying that (within your favoured theory) any "historic
present" type construction is necessarily an aberration rather than a
regular language? The "historic present" is used not only in NT Greek
but in some English dialects. I think both St. Mark and many of my
friends would be rather offended if you defined their way of speaking
and writing as an "aberration". And I suspect that there are languages
in which a "historic present" type construction is considered
perfectly normal and correct within certain genres etc of past
narrative. (Can anyone confirm this?) Is this really what you are
saying? Why can you not allow that, in the right genre and discourse
context, a form which is more commonly present can be used with past
meaning (or vice versa)?

Peter Kirk




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