Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Hi Bryan,
I just want to mention at the outset that I'm thoroughly enjoying 
these discussions, and I hope that I'm presenting my views in a 
way that is non-confrontational and with a spirit of mutual learning.  
If I cross that line, feel free to let me know.

> I don't blame you for wanting elegance, so I'll take a try:  I grant that a
> discourse can begin with a sequential form.  You do not.  That's the sum of
> our disagreement concerning Gen 42:8.  I did say in my last post "if we can
> grant that a sequential form can begin a discourse which the wayyiqtol
> plainly does."  

I grant that a discourse can begin with a WP; I don't grant that it's 
sequential.  However, I suspect that you're operating at least partly 
under the influence of G. Hatav's definition of sequentiality.  As you 
know, her definition includes the beginning of a sequence of 
narrative, a view that is very close to my own (so we may in fact 
just be quibbling over the semantics of the English term).  My 
questions are as follows:

1. Why, if we agree that the form can begin a narrative, a 
discourse, a whole book, a back-loop and so many other types of 
discourse, do we even need to consider the term "sequentiality"?  
My instinctive reaction is that insistence on using (and 
occasionally redefining, as Hatav does) this term deflects us from 
discovering the actual meaning of the form in question.  Having now 
devoured 4 of the 5 chapters in Hatav's book, I was excited by the 
first chapter, where she suggested that the WP has the potential 
for sequentiality, a potential that may or may not be realized within 
a given discourse.  However, she lost me in chapter 2 when she 
said flatly that "BH marks sequential clauses morphologically.  It 
has two sequential forms: *wayyiqtol* for clauses on the time-line, 
and *wqatal* for marking sequentiality in modal clauses.  These 
two forms will not appear in non-sequential clauses."  (p.56)  This 
seems to contradict the idea (responding to my article) that "The 
fact that clauses in *wayyiqtol* have their own 'thought' [in 
Washburn's terms] manifests their character of introducing their 
own R-time, and hence their potentiality of forming a sequence.  
This potentiality may not be realized when such clauses appear in 
isolation or in non-narratives."  (p.22)  It may be that I have 
misunderstood what she means by "potential" here, though.

2. On the assumption that the sort of back-loop we see in this 
passage can be done with a "sequential" form, what are the 
specific triggers that let a reader know that's what we're doing?  
Are they purely pragmatic?  The idea of a "jarring" interruption to 
hop back to Joseph's recognition (and their lack thereof) is 
unsatisfying: it could have been done just as easily and, IMO, just 
as jarringly (is that a word???) with an x-qatal clause (what I 
usually call a VS, for "verb-suffixed") as with a WP.  The least 
jarring, and in accord with the usual pattern as set forth by Hatav, 
would have been a participial form (qotel), so the effect could have 
been brought about regardless.  My biggest problem, as you can 
deduce, is that there are no syntactic markers to indicate that the 
discourse is broken at this point.  As I understand discourse 
analysis, there should be (but feel free to correct me on this point).
 
> Now for the long-winded stuff:  Why can I grant it?  Because of the
> principle of communicative cooperation that exists between writer and
> audience.  When a writer begins a discourse (or a back-loop) with a
> wayyiqtol, he counts on his audience to assume an unstated cause for this
> first event.  see Traugott and Pratt _Linguistics for Students of
> Literature_ Any narrative that begins, first sentence, with direct speech
> is a good example, e.g., the first sentence of Twain's "The Undertaker's
> Chat": "Now that corpse," said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of
> the deceased approvingly, "was a brick--every way you took him he was a
> brick." 

But again, there are usually syntactic markers of some sort to 
indicate where the new discourse unit begins.  I don't see any in 
this passage.  

> Or for something more BH-specific, you might want to check out Anderson's
> "Salience, Implicature, Ambiguity, and Redundancy in Clause-Clause
> Relationships in BH" in _BH and Discourse Linguistics_, ed. Bergen.  One of
> Anderson's points is that, in real life, events unfold in a multitude of
> temporal relationships, but that in narration, the writer is constrained by
> having to represent the various temporal relationships in a
> one-clause-at-a-time reading process--quite a challenge!   Anderson's
> concept of "implicature" is akin to the above mentioned "principle of
> cooperation."

Agreed, but I would say that's why languages have more than one 
syntactic form for expressing these intricate relationships, and if a 
writer chooses a particular form for a flashback of this type, it 
seems to me there must have been a good (syntactic) reason why 
s/he considered that form acceptable.  It's the same with my 
example from Judges.  Re Hatav's treatment, you once wrote:

--
You mention Jdg 12:8-12 as a counter example to the theory that 
the
wayyiqtol marks sequentiality.  Hatav also mentions that you have 
this
counter-example.  She considers it a candidate for one of the 3%
unexplained counter-examples in her corpus, and offers a "genre-
effect"
type of explanation.  She cites a private conference with Comrie in 
which
Comrie suggests that when the speaker/writer strays from narrative 
proper,
the sequential forms may appear in odd places.  She suggests the 
passage
here approaches chronicle or history rather than narrative proper.  
Well,
you know how I throw around the word genre--like a mechanic 
throws around
oil in the engine room of an old ship--but Hatav's explanation 
seems thin
to me.  
--

I couldn't agree more.  But it strikes me that you may be doing the 
same sort of thing with the Gen 42 example.  Regarding the 
narrative/chronicle explanation of Judges 12, I would ask whether 
the reader would have known intuitively that there was a difference 
(I'm still not even sure what it is); with the Gen 42 explanation, I 
question whether a reader would have known intuitively "this is a 
sequential form, but it's not really behaving sequentially here, or 
rather it's behaving as the beginning of a new sequence, etc. etc. 
etc."  IMNSHO, the simplest explanation for the various uses of the 
form is most likely to be the one closest to the actual situation.
 
> A little point of clarification:  I don't know of discourse analysists
> bending over backwards to prove wayyiqtol is either perfective or
> sequential.  Usually the focus is more on pragmatics than verbal semantics.
>  I'm just talking here (in these threads on verbal semantics), you
> know?--e-mail style!  ;-)   Bryan Rocine's jabbering does not represent the
> field!
> <the noise of loud cheering comes from the offices of discourse analysts
> everywhere>  ;-)

:-)  Actually, I would consider Hatav's chapter 2 a counter-example 
of this...there's a subtle redefinition of the notion of "sequentiality," 
followed by explanations of counter-examples such as the Judges 
12 one - pretty good gymnastics, or so it appears to me.  On the 
plus side, let me hasten to point out that her use of the idea of R-
time (which I consider the major contribution of her book to the 
study of Hebrew grammar) is excellent and will take us a long way 
toward better understanding of the HVS, and her categorization of 
the weqatal (what I call WS, for "waw-suffix") as modal put into 
words exactly what I have been thinking about that form (minus the 
sequentiality thing, of course ;-)


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