Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Paul Zellmer wrote


<I have bit back a response several times when you have made this statement
about
<others (in this case, "several members of this list") holding to a view
that verbs
<have different meanings in prose vs. poetry. The *only* one I consistently
see making
<such a statement is you, and you are always ascribing it to the
unspecified "others".

<On the contrary, I have noted most hold to a very consistent underlying
principle of
<the use of the verb forms.  Poetry *is* more free to modify the forms, for
emphasis,
<rhythm, or whatever, but this is true in any language, is it not?  The very
<order-consciousness of the English language gets put aside frequently in
its poetry,
<yet no one claims a separate grammar for it.  They simply refer to "poetic
license."
<Rolf, I posit that "poetic license" plays a role in Hebrew grammar as
well.  And as
<such, we should not build or modify the entire grammatical system based
solely or even
<mostly on what happens in an environment that is extremely sensitive to
the artistic
<presentation of ideas.  When I paddle a canoe, I use the same basic
strokes.  But when
<I get in the rapids, my application of those strokes changes drastically.
Poetry is
<fast flowing water, and the grammar used there probably reflects the
outside borders
<of the significance of the verb forms.

<Please, tell us *who* claims *what* before you generalize a position that
you go on to
<argue against.
>
>
>Hey, rather than try to pull down the theory, why don't you help us expand 
>our
>understanding of all that a wayyiqtol is, so we can better understand what
>actually
>*is* happening in these situations.  I personally would find that much
>more beneficial
>than lists of apparent or supposed cases where the normally predominate
>feature does
>not dominate the form's function.  Or maybe you are of the opinion that
>the wayyiqtol
>is *never* causes a clause to be preterite and *never* brings
>sequentiality into the
>picture.  We can always make these forms so bland that they convey no
>meaning at all!
>

Dear Paul,

I have already made a few comments regarding your words above, but because
of the last paragraph in your latest post which is the last paragraph
above, I deem it good to give some more comments. This is for the list
members to see the issue.

I start with the following quote from a recent book discussing Hebrew verbs:

"Gesenius (1909), Ben-Hayyim (1977), Qimron (1981) and others claim that
the language in the poetry texts differs in many respects from the prose
discourse (which is true about many languages, and might even have
universal validity). This is clear in the case of the aspect system. The
verb forms function differently in prose as opposed to poetry. I have
chosen in this study to examine narrative texts since, as pointed out to me
by Bernhard Comrie (pc), poetry often violate othervise valid linguistic
norms for poetic effect, often harking back to archaic styles etc."

Several members of the list have in the last months made comments in the
same direction, but after my question nobody has defended the view that
WAYYIQTOL (and the other forms)  has one tense or one aspect in prose and
another in poetry. If this is true, a model supposed to account for the
meaning of verbs in Hebrew cannot only deal with narrative but must be able
to account for *all* the forms in any genre.

It seems to me that you do not see the real issue in the study of Hebrew
verbs.  To use your boat illustration, what you are doing (and what you are
asking me to do in the last paragraph) is this: You sail down a river in a
boat, but you don't know whether it is a boat of rubber filled with air or
whether it is made of tree or of metal with several water-tight
compartments. When you get in the rapids your strokes changes drastically,
but this does not help if the rubber punctures and the boat sinks. Strokes
cannot help against shipwreck.

There is nothing wrong with discourse analysis (your strokes), but it alone
cannot explain the "semantic meaning" of verb forms, it can only explain
the pragmatic meaning (function). Semantic meaning has to be assumed by all
those using the method. In order to have a sound foundation for your
interpretation of Hebrew verbs you have to inspect the very structure of
your boat, even its smallest parts. Alviero has made the most out of
discourse analysis, starting with the obvious meaning (I would say "use")
of each form in narrative, and has made his assumptions of the meaning of
verb forms on the basis of the use of hundreds of narrative verbs. A very
fine piece of work!  However, the model does not work for the whole corpus
of Classical Hebrew texts and there is no mechanism to differentiate
between semantic and pragmatic meaning.

If discourse analysis is going to help us at all in our study of the Hebrew
Bible, we *have to* answer the following questions  in our own mind BEFORE
we start with it:

(1) Are YIQTOL, WAYYIQTOL, QATAL, and WEQATAL four different conjugations
with different semantic meanings, or is there just one prefix-conjugation
(YIQTOL and WAYYIQTOL) and one suffix conjugation (QATAL AND WEQATAL)?
(2) Is tense grammaticalized in Hebrew, i.e. does any conjugation code for
tense?
(3) Is aspect grammaticalized in Hebrew, i.e. does any conjugation code for
aspect?
(4) The conjugations we idenfify, do they code for either tense or aspect,
or can they be a blend of both?
(5) What is the real semantic meaning of the conjugations we identify?

These are some of the fundamental parts of our boat, and even if we are not
consciously aware of these questions, we have without realizing it, taken
our stand if we engange in discourse analysis. I do not say that my
approach is the only way, but I would say that an approach which do not
have a mechanism to differentiate between semantic and pragmatic factors is
very weak indeed, at least alone.  Doing discourse analysis without such a
mechanism is in my view RE:(UT RUA:X. Answering your last words above
illustrate the need for this difference: I claim that WAYYIQTOL is never
preterite (this is a tense designation, thus being semantic), but it is in
narrative texts for the most part sequential (this is pragmatic).



Regards
Rolf


Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo