Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Galia Hatav <ghatav AT aall.ufl.edu>]

Dear Jung

You wrote:
>
>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!

        Isn't it exciting?!

[snip]
>
>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.
>
        The examples I gave were to show the difference between English and
BH. While in English all the sentences are in simple past, in BH they will
have different verb forms. For (1a) I would expect wayyiqtol verbs in both
sentences.  In (1b) I would expect a wayyiqtol verb only for the first
sentence. The second sentence, interpreted as a state overlapping in time
the event reported in the first sentence, I would expect either qatal
('Mary had been feeling depressed') or qotel, generating a nominal
sentence: "and she depressed" (which does not exist in English).  For (1c)
I will expect wayyiqtol for the first sentence. The second sentence will
have also a wayyiqtol if it reports an inchoative event ('and the room
became dark'). If it is understood to report a state holding at the same
time with the event reported in the first sentence, I will expect a qatal
('there had been darkness in the room') or a qotel ('It was dark').
Note that we+X+qatal is not wayyiqtol. If my thesis is adequate such clause
would NOT introduce a new R-time.

The only problem, if it is a problem, is wayyiqtol in formulas, hendiadies
and paraphrases.

Did I understand your question?

        Re other languages. Actually I started looking into the verb forms
with respect to DRT because Hans Kamp in collaboration with C. Rohrer
(1983) show
that the passe simple in French, as opposed to the Imparait, works this way.

Galia

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