Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Moon-Ryul Jung" <moon AT computing.soongsil.ac.kr>]

Dear Galia Hatav,

I am excited to read your theory of Biblical Hebrew tense system based on
Hans Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory. I read his papers when I
studied computational linguistics at the Dept of Computer Science,
University of Pennsylvania. I was involved in the project for 
understanding
instructions and transforming them into 3D animation.  But it never 
occurred to me that I might be able to use the theory for my reading of 
Hebrew Scriptures!

To understand your theory better, let me ask some questions.

By using the following examples,

1. a. Mary entered the room. She turned the light on and...
    b. Mary entered the room. She felt depressed...
    c. Mary turned off the light. It was dark in the room.

you concluded that while in English past verbforms introduce new
reference time (R-time)  only by pragmatic inferences,  in BH the form 
of Wayyiqtol always (semantically) builds an R-time.

But you conceded:

  There are at least two cases where wayyiqtol
  clauses do not build a new R-time. One: in formulas such as "waydabber
  wayyomer" and hendiadies such as
  "wayyimshexu wayya'alu". The other case is with paraphrases: The 
narrator
  starts a story, stops and starts it again to provide some detail he did 
not  mention the first time. There are also counterexamples which I cannot
  explain. (My statistical counting shows 3% of such cases.)


If you have to concede that wayyiqtol clauses may not build a NEW R-time, 
but may  go back to previous time points, the situation seems to be the 
same as  English. Examples 1.b and 1.c above are more like wayyiqtol + (we 
+ X + qatal), where (we+X+qatal) do not tend to introduce a new R-time, but 
explains the situation in question. So, when we compare examples like 1.a 
with a sequence of wayyqtol clauses, may we not be able to conclude that 
the R-time is pragmatically determined both in English and in BH? Why do 
you believe that BH is different from English? Are you aware of any other 
languages like BH in this respect? The notion that the R-time could be 
semantically determined is so shocking to me.

Moon-Ryul Jung
Assistant Professor
Dept of Computer Science
Soongsil University,
Seoul, Korea