Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Kimmo Huovila wrote,


>> (7) 2Sam. 14:7 And now the whole family has risen against your handmaid,
>> and they say,  'Give up the man who struck (PARTICIPLE) his brother, that
>> we may kill him for the life of his brother whom he slew (QATAL)';
>
>This is an identifying use of the participle as (6c). The same comments
>apply.
>
>>
>> How shall we interpret the participle in (7)? In truth-conditional
>> linguistics. a literal translation of the participle in (7) would be
>> problematic in English. A sentence like (8) would be strange or impossible.
>>
>> (8) #Last january Rick was killing his wife, and He was sentenced to 20
>> years in prison because of the murder.
>>
>> Because a QATAL is parallel with the participle in (7), it cannot mean that
>> the man "was on the point of killing his brother", but the case was that
>> the killing actually had taken place. One alternative could be to say that
>> the participle is punctual (as some do)
>
>What about aspectually neutral in this construction?
>
>>, but I would strongly object to
>> such an interpretation, because this is against the progressive nature of
>> the participle (and would be ad hoc explanation)- and I assume that Hebrew
>> is a coherent language where one meaning of a form cannot be the diametral
>> opposite of its essence.
>
>Oppositions can be neutralized in some contexts. This is a concept very
>familiar from phonology, and applies here as well.
>
>> Therefore the progressive nature of the participle
>> must be accounted for somwhere. I see two alternative views: (a) The action
>> is resultative, i.e. we are led through the end of the striking and the
>> result is focused upon.
>
>If the result is focused on, not just allowed, and the internal
>structure is not revealed in this context, why not view it as a
>perfective? Sounds pretty perfective to me. Do you see any difference to
>a perfective in terms of the informational content or markedness, or in
>any way (apart from morphology)?
>
>>(b) The striking is viewed as something durative;
>> i.e. the Aktionsart of NKH is not punctual but durative, and the focus is
>> on the progression of the striking, and the end is ignored, because it is
>> implied (by to the Aktionsart of the verb).
>
>I fail to see how a verb with a FOCUS on the progression of the striking
>would have textual fit here.





Dear Kimmo,


I appreciate your fine comments. Because of our common linguistic
background we have the same understanding of many/most linguistic terms,
but it appears that we differ in our understanding of the key-term
"aspect".

In the study of a dead language the final word will never be said, but we
should try to make our premises (points of reference) explicit. This can
help the reader to make the judgment that given our premises our
conclusions are right or wrong. At the risk of boring someone I will once
more give a short outline of my premises:

(1) Aspect is connected with morphologic form and each form can only
represent one aspect. Thus aspect is not connected with the context, to the
effect that the same form in one context can be imperfective and in another
perfective. There is no place for a neutralization of aspects.

(2) There is a semantic distinction between tenses: Reference time
*allways* comes before the deictic point in past tense, and *allways* comes
after the deictic point in future tense.

(3) There are only three *semantic* (uncancelable) Aktionsart categories,
namely, durativity, dynamicity, and telicity. Properties such as stativity
and punctuality are pragmatic and they are therefore cancelable.

Applied to Hebrew I judge the active participle to be non-aspectual, i.e. a
verbal noun making progressive action visible. YIQTOL and WAYYIQTOL  are
imperfective and QATAL  and WEQATAL are perfective.

The strength of my model based upon these participles and with the
definitions of perfectivity and imperfectivity given, is that *all* the
verbs of the Tanach can be accounted for, those being viewed as anomalous
as well. Another strength is that the points of reference both are clearly
visible and are restricted and I am bound by them. This makes the model in
principle falsifyable and reduces circularity (The premises may be wrong,
but they are distinct and clearly expressed, and I must be able to defend
the imperfectivity of *all* examples of YIQTOL  and WAYYIQTOL  and the
perfectivity of *all* examples of QATAL  and WEQATAL.)

The model predicts that in many instances the perfective and imperfective
aspects are used with the same *sense*. This is not because the aspects are
neutralized, but because the Aktionsart of the verbs plays a more important
part to convey meaning than the aspects do. For verbs with a particular
Aktionsart, therefore, neither of the aspects does add anything to the
meaning, and both can therefore be used interchangeably. The best place to
see this, is in accounts that occur two times in the Tanach.

Because states by definition are durative but not dynamic, and only
occationally telic ("She is pregnant."), a perfective or imperfective verb
can be used without any difference in meaning, as is seen in (1) and (2).
The aspects does not add anything to the durative nature of the
"Aktionsart" of the verb. (States cannot rightly be said to have
"Aktionsart" because there is no action, but states usually are put in the
same category because they exist on the same plane as Aktionsart.)

(1) 1Kings 9:8 And though this house is (YIQTOL) so high,

(2) 2Chr. 7:21 And this house, which is (QATAL) so high,

The verb "to ascend" is durative and dynamic but not telic. Consider (3)
and (4)  where the situations are telic. Do the different aspects give the
clauses different meanings? Hardly! The important factor is the lexical
meaning of (LH - "to go up". The context - and not the aspects - shows that
the end of the action was reached and that is all we need to know. An
infinitive or a participle could have been used in each case without any
addition or substraction of meaning, and the same is true with a QATAL and
a YIQTOL. It is true that the natural interpretation of the QATAL is that
it includes the end, but that the end objectively was reached we already
know from the context. It is equally true that the focus of the YIQTOL is
on a small progressive part of the ascending, not including the end, but
this is no problem because we know from the context that the end was
reached, so the context makes the end visible and not the imperfective
aspect. Thus the aspects contribute nothing that we do not know on the
basis of Aktionsart and context and therefore they can be used
interchangeably.

From the observation above we can formulate the following rule: "When the
imperfective and perfective aspect do not add any new information, but all
the information the writer wants to convey can be gathered from other
factors (Aktionsart, context, linguistic convention etc) both aspects can
be used without any difference in meaning (though there may be a difference
in use due to the linguistic convention, and this can be seen by discourse
analyzis)." The aspects are not *neutralized* because their own meaning is
there, but it is not necessary information because it does not add anything
new. To use the terminology from my previous post: the progressive nature
of the imperfective aspect is accounted for because of the durative nature
of the verb. So we need not use much energy to find a difference in meaning
in every instance when different aspects are used.

(3) 2Kings 12:17 Then Hazael king of Syria went up (YIQTOL), and fought
against Gath, and took it; and Hazael set his face to go up to Jerusalem.

(4) 2Chr. 24:23 And it came to pass at the end of the year, that the army
of the Syrians came up (QATAL) against him: and they came to Judah and
Jerusalem, and destroyed all the princes of the people from among the
people, and sent all the spoil of them unto the king of Damascus.

It seems to me that the most important obstacle for understand the Hebrew
conjugations, is that researchers force their Germanic (or Modern Hebrew)
consciousness of tense upon Classical Hebrew. On the basis of this
thinking, it is concluded that an account of terminated actions in the past
can only be described by verbs with past tense or the perfective aspect.
And this is the foundation of the modern understanding of WAYYIQTOL. One of
my principal points is the very opposite, namely that narrative is
expressed by imperfective verbs where only a part of the action is made
visible, and the end is not foucsed on at all, but it is construed from the
context (the nature of narrative accounts). The reason why I reject a
neutralization of the aspects is the same, nemely, that this way of
reasoning is also based upon tense-thinking. BTW, I find the Greek aspects
to have the same nature as the Hebrew ones, though being more restricted in
use, because there are more "conjugations" (usually called "tenses").
Fanning´s study is very fine, but I reject his idea of punctual present for
the same reason as stated above.


Just as in your situation, my time is limited, so I will only be able to
comment on a few of your points. But I think the whole list will benefit if
you define what you mean by aspect and tell whether aspects exclusively are
connected with morphological form or not.



Regards

Rolf


Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo










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