Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Let me answer some of the following below. My conclusion: we are not 
far apart, but we need to answer some other difficult (perhaps 
unanswerable) questions before we can decide on a basic word order.

Meanwhile Prof. Niccacci has summed up much of what I was thinking in 
a much more coherent way. Perhaps Dave can judge whether he has 
begged the unanswered questions or has found a way to avoid having to 
answer them.

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[7]: BH, Jouon on syntax?
Author:  dwashbur AT nyx.net at internet 
Date:    12/05/1999 08:24


Peter wrote:
> DW: ...Nope.  That wasn't the criterion. 
>
> PK: Well then, what was it? You did write earlier "Syntactically, it 
> only makes sense to begin with the most basic form of the verb, which 
> is the qatal.  All other forms, including those with W-, are made by
> adding something to it..." I do not accept that yiqtol is derived from 
> qatal plus an affix, see the following answer.

DW: Then where does it come from?

PK: q-t-l plus an affix, or a set of affixes, one indicating the verb 
paradigm (better say this than "tense", or even "conjugation" which 
can refer to the BINYANIM) and another indicating the person, number 
and gender within the paradigm.

> DW: ...Then what would you say is the foundational form of the verb? 
>
> PK: The only foundational form I would recognise is the triconsonantal 
> root. All surface forms are derived by adding various affixes
> (including infixes) to that.

DW: At the level of x-bar syntax, I quite agree.  In fact, one of the really 
exciting things about using transformational-generative grammar to
look at Hebrew is how well it fits, I would almost say exemplifies, 
the x-bar criterion.  However, see below.

PK: I, like Doug, am not committed to TG, partly because I have not 
had the chance to study it in depth. So please forgive me for 
questioning arguments on the lines of "this is likely to be true 
because it fits well with TG."

> DW: ...Rare in all possible types of ancient Hebrew, or just in the 
> specialized type of literature that we work with?  The nature of the 
> corpus has to be considered as well.
>
> PK: Our corpus is not all that narrow, it does consist of a wide range 
> of different genres. (Out of interest, what size and variety of corpus 
> would usually be considered sufficient for a linguistic study
> determining the basic word order of a modern language?) To say

DW: I wish the TG grammarians would give me a straight answer to that 
very question!  All they usually tell me is that the BH corpus is too 
small.  I don't buy it.  There's a greater amount of extrapolation and 
generalization (read, speculation) involved because of the size of
the corpus and the lack of native speakers, but I still believe it can 
be done and done effectively.

> anything beyond this corpus is pure speculation. I would accept that 
> any conclusion has to be somewhat tentative because of the limited
> corpus.

DW: Agreed.  However, for that very reason a certain amount of 
speculation is necessary and unavoidable.

PK: Agreed. But if the level of speculation gets too high the 
whole exercise could become pointless.

In any case the size of the corpus is irrelevant to this
> particular question as I am simply suggesting that clauses with an 
> initial we- prefix should be considered alongside those without,
> simply because the alternative of looking only at clauses with no 
> initial we- would give us a far more limited set of examples.

DW: Precisely!  That's the whole idea.  From the medieval grammarians 
on there has been a perceived distinction in syntax/usage/whatever one 
calls it between the simple qatal and the qatal with we (whether we 
call it waw-consecutive, waw-conversive, waw-relative [with 
Waltke-O'Connor] or whatever).  If for no other reason than that 
history, we have to begin by dealing with them separately.  If they 
show a fair to large amount of homogeneity in terms of usage, context 
etc. then we can be justified in lumping them together.  But to begin 
with we separate the various conjugations from each other precisely to 
reduce the size of the field and give us a better chance of figuring 
out what is going on.  If they are two allomorphs of the same 
conjugation, fine.  But if they aren't, we can't lump them together 
just to get a bigger field of examples for studying the qatal.

PK: Agreed. But if we treat weqatal as provisionally syntactically 
different from we- plus qatal, we are then saying that qatal cannot 
appear clause-initially except in the (perhaps rare) cases of 
asyndeton. Perhaps we conclude that wayyiqtol substitutes for clause 
initial we- plus qatal (that is probably oversimplified). So we have 
to find a way out of the possible trap of defining verb-second as 
basic simply because we are uncertain about verb-initial forms and so 
rule them out of the discussion, i.e. the basic word order becomes the 
one used in sentences we understand. If we cannot answer the question 
of weqatal, then we have to conclude that we are uncertain about basic 
word order.

> PK: Concerning qatal and weqatal: I am not sure that I have a theory 
> in any technical sense. But my thinking, which is unchanged as far as 
> I know, is something like this: On a morphological or syntactic basis 
> (the distinction I suppose is based on whether we- is taken as a
> prefix or a separate word, which is I think a rather arbitrary choice)

DW: Arbitrary how?  Either it is a separate word or it isn't.  The 
question isn't what we think it is, but what they thought it was.

PK: I disagree. There are many cases where word boundaries are 
arbitrary. Consider Turkish "alabilir" and Azerbaijani "ala bilir" 
which both mean "he can buy" in these two closely related languages. A 
literate Turk would call this one word and a literate Azerbaijani two 
words (the second being an auxiliary verb), but in fact the difference 
is simply one of orthographic convention. If you can find a total 
illiterate and ask "is this two words or one?" he probably wouldn't 
understand the question. These languages both have a conjunction "ve" 
which is borrowed from the Semitic one but written as a separate word. 
More directly relevant is the Latin suffixed conjunction -que which was 
written as a suffix, in comparison with its Greek cognate TE which is 
written as a separate word though phonologically bound (enclitic). And 
don't forget we don't have native Hebrew speakers to ask whether we- is 
a separate word.

> the form weqatal is made up from two morphemes we- and qatal (and 
> qatal is further made up from the root q-t-l and one or more infix 
> morphemes giving the vowels).

DW: Well, yes and no.  We have to be careful to distinguish conjugation 
from inflection.  I see two distinct levels of formation going on here: 
the choice of conjugation ("tense") determines which set of
inflections will be used.  If we just lump it all together in the form of 
affixes, it's likely to give us a skewed picture of things.  As for the 
triliteral root, x-bar principles are what determine the "infixes"
(which are actually phonological realizations of the syntactic LF 
"verb," "noun" etc. and can only marginally be considered true 
morphemes).  So there's a definite hierarchy of operations that we 
can discern from the way an S-level verb (or other part of speech) is 
built.  To determine the functions of the various verb forms, 
especially the stems and "tenses", it's important to keep them 
distinct.

PK: Agreed. Combining my suggestion with your hierarchy, weqatal is 
we- + ((q-t-l + qatal_paradigm_indicator) + 
3rd_sing_masculine_suffix); qatal_paradigm_indicator is a double infix 
a-a and 3rd_sing_masculine_suffix is a null morpheme in Hebrew (a 
short final vowel in Arabic).

This is NOT the same as I have been
> arguing concerning wayyiqtol, which I view as more than we- plus 
> yiqtol.

DW: So do I.

On the other hand, from a semantic viewpoint I do see the
> meaning of weqatal as being different from the sum of the two parts 
> we- and qatal.

DW: The question is, how does this come about?  That's the 
question I'm hoping to answer (eventually).

This is hard to account for; on the other hand, such
> situations are common in language e.g. in the English present perfect 
> "I have gone" the word "have" does not have its normal meaning
> "possess" (any attempt to explain as "I possess the attribute of
> gone-ness" would be rather far-fetched except perhaps as a theory of 
> how this form arose in the distant past) but its meaning has been
> modified within this construction.

DW: I think that what's going on with "have" (as well as avoir in 
French, haben in German etc.) is pretty clear as far as their dual 
status of "full verb" and "auxiliary verb."  As the parallel examples 
in several Romance languages show, certain verbs can perform this dual 
function.  However, it's quite a jump from that to saying that a 
simple conjunction such as we- or English "and" can do something 
similar to a verb.  I don't say it's impossible, but I'd have to see 
some heavy-duty backing for the idea.  The other possibility is that 
it's an inflectional morpheme that happens to be homonymous with
the conjunction; in the case of wayyiqtol this is exactly what I've 
argued, based partly on the different vocalization.  It's harder to 
explain why such a morpheme built onto the qatal would have 
developed in such a way that it looks and sounds (we assume) 
EXACTLY like the simple conjunction so that we have to look
beyond the word itself to decide which it is.

PK: Please treat my analogy with auxiliary verbs as a tentative 
suggestion. I'm not sure I have seen a better one. Your idea of an 
homonymous inflectional morpheme would also need some heavy-duty 
backing.

If we keep syntax and semantics
> strictly separate, as I think Dave prefers to do,

DW: Yes I do.

this semantic shift
> should not affect the arguments for basic word order; but perhaps we 
> do need to take care that there is not some confusing interaction.

DW: Ya lost me here.  Please develop this "confusing interaction" 
idea for me some more?

PK: Let me rephrase this: Premise 1: weqatal is syntactically or 
morphologically we- plus qatal; Premise 2: syntax and semantics are 
strictly separate; Conclusion: the fact that weqatal is 
semantically distinct from we- plus qatal should be irrelevant to 
the question of basic word order. You seem to be questioning the 
conclusion because you question premise 1, which is fair enough. I 
am suggesting that the conclusion may not be sound because I am not 
as certain as you seem to be about premise 2, and suggest that 
semantics may interact with syntax in ways which would confuse this 
argument.

Peter Kirk

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

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