Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Peter Kirk wrote:


>Dear Rolf,
>
>Yes, I admit to little familiarity with the literature on aspect. But
>what I am trying to pick up about this is leaving me very confused. It
>seems that even those who are familiar with the literature are far
>from clear on how they understand the concept of aspect and how it
>relates to Hebrew. And I am still not sure if this is a debate about
>the meaning of technical terms or about any real substance concerning
>the Hebrew language.
>
>Let me rephrase my point. What we see in Hebrew texts is verb forms,
>not aspects. We cannot point to a word and say "this is such-and-such
>aspect" without going first through some theory (and I am not sure we
>can do it even then). Broman Olsen has a definition of aspect; others
>have other definitions; others simply follow the definitions in
>another language (not necessarily their mother tongue - I tend to
>relate questions of aspect with Russian). But there seems to be no
>agreement on how Hebrew verb forms correspond with anyone's definition
>of aspect, indeed this is the very point of contention. So when you
>asked e.g.
>
>     "What is the relationship between Hebrew aspects and time? Does
>     the perfective aspect uniformely signal that the end was reached
>     at RT and the imperfective aspect uniformely signal that it was
>     not reached? And if not, what relation has the end of an event to
>     each aspect?"
>
>you were presupposing some particular mapping of Hebrew verb forms on
>to aspects (either imperfective or perfective). I am not sure if you
>were expecting answers relating to your own mappings or to Bryan's
>(tentative) quite different ones. I would be happier to try to answer
>the following question:
>
>     "What is the relationship between Hebrew verb paradigms and time?
>     Do certain paradigms uniformly signal that the end was reached at
>     RT and other paradigms uniformly signal that it was not reached?
>     And if not, what relation has the end of an event to each
>     paradigm?"
>
>That way we are not presupposing an answer in advance. We cannot be
>sure that there is any consistent aspectual nature to Hebrew verb
>forms until we can describe this nature, and we have not yet been able
>to do that. So I am just agreeing with Paul's excellent posting,
>especially when he wrote: "Aspect per se does not appear to be solely
>determined on the word-level in this language." I hope that helps you
>to understand my point.
>

Dear Peter,

Your post above is a very fine one, and I agree in most of what you are
saying. I agree completely with your words in quotation marks. The
differencce between these words and those I asked (which also are in
quotation marks), is that I had already collected enough data to answer
your questions when I posed mine. Thus, the first words in quotation marks
above (mine) represent a much later stage in the research.

As I have pointed out before, the basic principle of my research is to
differentiate between "semantic meaning" and "conversational pragmatic
implicature.  This means that I try to find "universal properties" which
can be used both in English and Hebrew. Regarding time/tense I claim that
(+past) and (+future)  are universal properties. We have a deictic center
(C) and (+past) events occur before C and (+future) occur after C.  This
distinction is valid in all languages, even those which do not have
grammaticalized tenses. Even these languages have pragmatic markers for
events which occur before, contemporaneous with or after C.

I first asked your question: "What is the relationship between Hebrew verb
paradigms and time?" 20 years ago. Since that time I have also worked with
it in the light of the two universal properties (+past) and (+future) and
have gathered enough data to draw the same conclusion as Waltke/O'Connor
that a particular tense is not the semantic meaning any Hebrew verb form.
By way of exclusion or falsification I think I have a very strong case for
this conclusion. Having eliminated tense, modality and aspect remains in
the TAM-system of Hebrew. There are strong reasons to think that neither
modality is the semantic meaning of any Hebrew verb form, and therefore
only aspect remains.  The Hebrew verb forms may of course have a meaning
which is unknown in the languages we know, and this has been suggested by a
few writers. However, TAM-systems is used universally by linguists, and
first of all we have to do research inside this system.

To investigate the aspect-question, I use three universal properties
related to the Vendlerian categories (called "Lexical Aspect" by Broman
Olsen, "Situation Aspect" by Carlota Smith, and "Procedural
Characteristics" by Carl Backe). These properties are (+dynamic),
(+durative), and (+telic).  I claim that the oppositions to these three,
"stativity", "punctiliarity" and "atelicity" are pragmatic factors in
English and Hebrew, and my model can be punctured by showing that this is
not true.  The combination of systematically applying these three universal
semantic properties to Hebrew verbs, and applying the Reichenbachian system
of Reference Time and Event Time to the same verbs, give interesting
results. First, this approach shows that the Hebrew conjucations have
aspect characteristics. Second, it shows that there are two conjugations in
Hebrew and not four. One reason for drawing the last conclusion is that in
the relatively few situations which come close to being "minimal pairs"
WAYYIQTOL  and YIQTOL  behave similarly as far as ET/RT is concerned, and
QATAL and WEQATAL  behave similarly. Third, it shows that Hebrew aspect is
somewhat different from English aspect because the end of an event is not
the definite distinguishing point between the aspect in Hebrew as it is in
English (in most cases it is such a distinguishing point also in Hebrew).
This suggests that English aspects express "relative time" (in the
Reichenbachian sense) while the Hebrew aspects are time indifferent.

The point, therefore, is that I have been forced by the different steps of
my research to conclude that aspects are grammaticalized in Hebrew, and
that they are different from English aspects. My definition of Hebrew
aspect is the narrowest possible generalization that can account for all
the data I have got after working with the above-mentioned three properties
and ET/RT in the whole corpus.



Regards
Rolf

Rolf Furuli
Lecturer in Semitic languages
University of Oslo