Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Matt,
> >Matt wrote:
> >>
> >> In searching for answers for my own question, I have found a very good
> >> example of interrupted wayyiqtols (with no verbs of motion). 2 Sam 11.17
> >> has:
> >>
> >>    wayyillachamu           'et-yo'ab       wayyapol
> >min-ha`am ...
> >>    and they battled        Joab            and they fell
> >some of the people
> >>    wayamot         gam     'uriyyah.
> >>    and he died     also    Uriah.
> >>
> >> It is quite impossible that there was a battle THEN some of the army died
> >> THEN Uriah died! Do you think these wayyiqtols are "functionally"
> >> imperfective? If not, what are they aspectually?
> 
> 
> >I don't think aspect is in view.  Aspect in Hebrew depends on
> >context and the meanings of the verbs used.
> 
> Which sort of "aspect" are you talking about? 

???  You were the one who asked "what are they aspectually?"  
I'm not sure what it is you're fishing for.

"Context and meaning of the
> verbs used" sounds like Aktionsart. I am talking about Perfectivity, an
> independent but related grammatical category. If wayyiqtol grammaticises
> perfectivity, the example above needs more explanation as it relates two
> situations that (it is highly reasonable to assume) occur *within* the
> temporal development of the first situation (the battle).

I'm not saying wayyiqtol grammaticises perfectivity.  I'm saying it 
doesn't grammaticise any aspect, whether perfectivity, 
imperfectivity, or whatever.  All those things are contained within 
the semantics of the words used.

> >and If so, how would the
> >> reader know not to link these sequentially, or to see them as perfective.
> >
> >The reader would know not to link these sequentially because a
> >native speaker would have known that the wayyiqtol is not
> >sequential.
> 
> Do you follow Comrie then in taking sequentiality as implicature? Hatav
> argues that sequentiality is grammaticised in Hebrew in the wayyiqtol form,
> but examples like the above also present problems for this view.

I haven't read Comrie, but I take sequentiality as being a function of 
context, not of verb form.  Yes, I part company with Hatav on this 
point.

> The wayyiqtol is the simple clause: "They did battle.
> >Some people fell.  Uriah also died."  There are no syntactic
> >dependencies or other types of connection (temporal, causal,
> >result, apposition), each clause says what it says.  Doing battle is
> >an inherently non-perfective action, so the aspect is contained in
> >the meaning of the verb.
> 
> Again I think that there is mismatch of terminology here. TO BATTLE is
> dynamic, non-telic, and controlled by the Agent, so its Aktionsart is
> Activity (or as you wrote Action). But perfectivity is independent of this
> and not inherent. An imperfective view of a battle would be the soldier's
> view, a perfective view would be the historians. So Aktionsart is contained
> in the verb (more strictly in the predicate, since TO DO BATTLE FOR 3 DAYS
> is telic, and THE STORM BATTLED THE FOREST is not Agentive etc).

Define for me what you mean by aktionsart.  I'm operating under 
the definition used in Greek, which is essentially the same as 
"aspect."  I suspect you're using some terms in a different way 
here.  What I'm saying is, perfectivity and imperfectivity are not 
functions of the verb forms in Hebrew.  They are semantic factors of 
the words involved.

> The presentation of the battle in this example seems to me to be from the
> soldier's view (imperfective) as it recounts changes in the internal
> development of the battle as it progresses.

The point of view is the narrator's.  But really, the way it's set out in 
these clauses, whose point of view doesn't matter.  From any 
angle, it's describing the development of the battle with both the 
cause and partial content of Israel's losses.

> Some people were killed, Uriah among
> >them.  These are events that are inherently perfective (the act of
> >dying tends to have a definite terminus) so their aspect is
> >contained in the meanings of the verbs, as well.
> 
> Perfective should be distinguished from telicity.

How so?  Define what you mean by "perfectivity" then.

> In the context, the
> >people falling and Uriah dying clearly happened during the battle,
> >so context tells us that these things happened before the terminus
> >of the battle.  None of this is contained in the syntax of the
> >wayyiqtol.
> 
> How then would Hebrew writers write, "There was a battle. Then some people
> died (post-war syndrome?). Then Uriah died."? 

Easy, by using explicit conjunctions.  wayyillax"m.  )axar"y k"n 
some people died.  I don't know the ancient Hebrew term for "post-
war syndrome," so I'll skip that.  wegam Uriah died.  Or something 
like that.

You seem to have bleached the
> wayyiqtol of all semantic function. 

Syntactic forms don't have "semantic function."  That one of the 
fundamental principles of separation of syntax and semantics.  I 
haven't bleached anything; it wasn't there to begin with.

If it does not grammaticise aspect or
> tense, what does it do? What relationship does it have to the deictic
> centre? It seems like a *great* amount of implicature is being placed on
> wayyiqtol.

I could say "read my _Hebrew Studies_ paper," but basically what 
it does is signal a syntactically independent thought, a simple 
declarative sentence without syntactic connections to what 
precedes.  "Syntactic connection" says nothing about semantic 
connections, and in fact there are some semantic connections in 
these clauses.  But they are functions of semantics, not syntax.  
It's important to keep the two separate.  And I have no idea what 
you mean by a great amount of implicature.

> >> Why isn't the Hebrew, wayhi behillachem wayyapol ...?
> >
> >Without asking the author we can't be sure, but I suspect that the
> >rapid-fire change of verbal subjects may have something to do with
> >it.  The soldiers came out of the city, engaged Joab in battle, some
> >Israelites fell, Uriah died also.  Bing, bang, boom.  Considering
> >what David told Joab to do to Uriah, this quick run-down of the
> >action following the siege tells us in very blunt language and
> >structure that David's plan to get rid of Uriah worked just the way
> >he planned it.
> 
> But then if Joab is cancelling the converstional implicature by using three
> wayyiqtols, doesn't that mean that on a normal interpretation three
> wayyiqtols would be perfective? 

Where did you get anything about "cancelling the converstional 
[sic] implicature" from what I wrote?  I'm afraid you're reading your 
own discourse approach into my non-discourse approach.

If this is normal Hebrew for this sort of
> recounting of events, then how can anything be read into Joab's use of the
> verb forms?

Precisely the point!  Why do you want to read anything into it?  As 
someone wrote quite a while back, absence of the wayyiqtol is 
much more significant than presence of it.  It's the simple form, like 
the old commercial used to give for examples of the simple 
declarative sentence: "Headaches hurt.  Aspirin cures headaches.  
Brand X is pure aspirin."  What would you read into these verbs?  
And why?  If you read anything into them, you're putting something 
there that the author didn't.  Thus it is with the wayyiqtol: it's the 
simple declarative, and if you read something into it, you're putting 
something there that the writer didn't.

> However, I have also thought of an alternative explanation that combines
> your observations about the context (Aktionsart) and perfectivity. Concepts
> such as "battles", "meetings", "carnivals" etc tend to be seen as single
> "events" just like "explosions" "drinking tea" etc. Such complex events have
> unusual syntactical properties, and I think this may solve our problems.

No, they have unusual semantic properties, not syntactic 
properties.

> Such complex events can introduce a temporal frame, such as the adverbial
> "In the year 1980, ...". In this the idea is, "And there was a battle, and
> in the battle ...". Dahl argues that R, E, and S time are insufficient to
> account for tense distinctions, and that one must include in many cases an
> F-time (temporal frame). So the battle is conceived of as perfective, as a
> single event in the past, but because of its verbal semantics, it introduces
> a temporal frome into which other perfective events can be inserted. I would
> further argue (but this is not necessary) that this only works if the
> speaker and reader know that a particular predicate can be used to introduce
> a temporal frame. For example, if I said, using the same verb-forms
> throughout,
> 
> 1a.    I went to the carnival. And I bought some candy-floss. And I rode a
> pony.
> 1b.   I went to the ticket-booth. And I bought a bus-ticket. And I caught a
> bus.
> 
> Because of the semantics of "carnival" you would assume that the buying and
> riding in 1a occured *during* the carnival, but in 1b you would assume that
> the buying and riding occured *after*.

Precisely my point!  The semantics of "carnival" indicate the 
relationship of the other items with it, just as the semantics of a 
bus ride do the same thing.  Syntactically, these clauses are alike. 
The only thing that makes one sequential and the other not is the 
semantics of the situation and the terms used.  The above 
description about the battle is unnecessarily complex; it need not 
be conceived as perfective.  It need not be conceived with any 
aspectual meaning at all, at least not from a syntactic point of 
view.  Semantically, whether it is seen as perfective or not is going 
to depend on the material that follows: semantically, must it have 
taken place during the battle or after?  If you let go of the aspect 
idea, you'll find that you have a much better handle on the behavior 
of the wayyiqtol.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"No good deed goes unpunished."