Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Peter,

One last comment to one of your points:


>RF
>My research is based on truth-conditional lingustics, as is the case with
>Galia's work as well. In such a system past, present, and future meaning is
>the backbone. And the point is that, an event that occurring before our
>vantage point has past meaning, an event contemporaneous with the
>vantagepoint has present meaning, and an event occurring before the
>vantagepoint has future meaning. Wheter you describe this with letters or
>not is unimportant. If you do not find truth-conditional linguistics
>meaningful, that is your privilege.
>
>PK: It is, I am sure, very meaningful and helpful with many languages.
>But you cannot assume it to be helpful for Hebrew. Indeed your data
>below seem to show clearly that WEQATAL cannot be classified clearly
>on the past-present-future axis or backbone. You have said the same
>about QATAL and, less recently, WAYYIQTOL. So this seems to be
>evidence that Hebrew is tenseless, as other languages are known to be.
>(An alternative way to rescue the relevance of tense in Hebrew would
>be to refine one's notion of tense in Hebrew to make a better fit with
>the facts, e.g. one might in principle be able to find that these past
>WEQATALs are in some sense "future in the past" or "relative future".)
>I don't see how a system in which past, present and future is the
>backbone can be especially helpful for study of tenseless languages.


RF
Truth-conditional linguistics is a working-tool that does not presuppose
any structure of verbs in the language to which it is applied. The tool
describes a semantic uncancelable relationship between past, present, and
future meaning, and is definitely one of the best tools that can be used to
study Hebrew, because it can reveal whether Hebrew is tenseless or not. In
addition, by help of the tool,it can be shown that only three groups
related to AKtionsart have semantic, uncancelable properties,i.e. when a
verb has one of the properties it cannot cease to have this property. The
three are durativity, dynamicity, and telicity (note that stativity is not
semantic). Armed with my tool and the semanitic meaning it points to, I am
in a very good position to be able to describe the TAM (tense-mood-aspect)
system of Hebrew,starting with the smallest possible units - though without
the traditional presuppositions.




Regards

Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo