Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk"<peter_kirk AT sil.org>]

Dear Rolf,

Thank you for your clear statement of your falsifiable model. I have 
read all of this, but I have kept below the sections relevant to my 
own arguments.

(I apologise if I seem to be repeating myself, but then so are you. 
At least this will save Jonathan looking through the archives.)

Now you claim that your model is falsifiable. I have no quarrel with 
that. But a valid model is not only one which is falsifiable in 
principle: it is also one which has been tested and not falisified!

As I understand it, you are including all WAYYIQTOL forms when you 
write "THE IMPERFECTIVE ASPECT (PREFIX FORMS) REPRESENTS A CLOSE-UP 
VIEW OF A SITUATION FROM A SHORT DISTANCE WITH THE DETAILS VISIBLE." 
Furthermore, you are saying that this imperfectivity is a semantic 
feature which is uncancellable. Please correct me if I have 
misunderstood this. So, you are asserting as a falsifiable statement 
that every prefix forms in the Hebrew Bible without exception, 
including WAYYIQTOL forms, "REPRESENTS A CLOSE-UP VIEW OF A SITUATION 
FROM A SHORT DISTANCE WITH THE DETAILS VISIBLE." So, your statement is 
falisified if I find one counter-example. Is that correct? I will 
concede that we need more than one example because of the possibility 
of textual corruption, but two or three should be sufficient to avoid 
that possibility.

I would then bring you back to some examples of WAYYIQTOL which I 
mentioned before, and to which I did not receive a satisfactory answer 
before. Specifically, the large numbers of WAYYIQTOLs in the genealogy 
in Genesis 5 (which was hardly a close-up view, even on the most 
conservative possible datings this was written more than 2000 years 
after the events!) and in the account of the building of the 
Tabernacle in Exodus 36-39. If you want specific cases, look at the 
examples of WAYYAMOT in Genesis 5:5,8,11 etc. - I don't see how you 
can argue that the Aktionsart of this verb implies that details are 
visible. These are representative of a very large number of WAYYIQTOLs 
in narrative throughout the historical parts of the Hebrew Bible. I 
claim that it is simply not true that every one of these "REPRESENTS A 
CLOSE-UP VIEW OF A SITUATION FROM A SHORT DISTANCE WITH THE DETAILS 
VISIBLE." Indeed, most of them are much closer to your contrary 
definition of perfective aspect which "REPRESENTS A BROADER VIEW FROM 
SOME DISTANCE WHERE THE DETAILS ARE NOT VISIBLE." I claim therefore 
that your falsifiable assertion is falsified, not just by a small 
number of cases but by the majority of cases of the most common verb 
form in Hebrew, WAYYIQTOL. Thus your statement that WAYYIQTOL is 
imperfective, even on your own definition, is false.

I await your response, including an explanation of how these 
WAYYIQTOLs can be considered imperfective on your definition.

Peter Kirk



______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re: YIQTOL with past meaning
Author:  <furuli AT online.no> at Internet 
Date:    30/01/2000 13:08

<snip>

It is very important for me to have reference points, that is, I need 
a clearly defined frame for my research by which I myself and others 
can check my results. Thus my method comes close to those being used 
by the natural sciences, and I strive to fulfill Karl Popper's demand 
of falsifiability. Therefore I am very sceptical to models that 
exclusively are based on induction, as a means to pinpoint the 
*meaning* of Hebrew verbs. That is the reason why I find discourse 
analysis to be an excellent tool to describe the linguistic convention 
of Hebrew (how forms are used), but to be completely impotent as 
regards explaining whether Hebrew has two, four, or five conjugations 
and the *meaning* of each form.

As a basis for my study I use two assumptions: (1) Hebrew is a 
language that can be studied by help of the same methods as other 
languages, and (2) Semantic meaning is connected with morphology and 
is uncancelable (a property of a particular form that is *semantic* 
can never be lost or changed, but will allways be a part of that 
form).

<snip>

This conclusion, however, does not necessarily mean that (1), (2), 
(3), and (4) above have to be rejected, and that QATAL should now be 
viewed as Dick and YIQTOL as Harry, to use your words. To the 
contrary, QATAL  and YIQTOL do have the general characteristics of the 
perfective and imperfective aspect respectively. So we need not 
introduce any allegorical or spirital dimensions that would change the 
nature of QATAL and YIQTOL from being aspects to being Dick and Harry. 
The normal linguistic procedure when one property of a form must be 
rejected, is to try to find the most narrow generalization that can 
account for all the characteristics of that form, and this is exactly 
what I have done with the definition:

THE IMPERFECTIVE ASPECT (PREFIX FORMS) REPRESENTS A CLOSE-UP VIEW OF A 
SITUATION FROM A SHORT DISTANCE WITH THE DETAILS VISIBLE. THE 
PERFECTIVE ASPECT (SUFFUX FORMS) REPRESENTS A BROADER VIEW FROM SOME 
DISTANCE WHERE THE DETAILS ARE NOT VISIBLE.

<snip>

Your explanation may be quite close to mine. However, there seems to 
be at least one important difference, namely, the view of how aspect 
is expressed. The strength of my model, I believe, is that its parts 
are clearly defined, and therefore it is falsifyable. The basis for 
its falsifyability is that aspect is connected with *form*, not with 
*function*, but if I understand you correctly, this is not the case in 
your model...

<snip>