Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Joseph Brian Tucker wrote:


>Shalom
>
>WO page 486, discussing Fientive Verbs mentions "the prefective sense may
>be...complex" and he quotes 1 Sam. 18:30 as an example, "As often as they
>came out, David *met with* more *success* than all the (other) servants of
>Saul." (1 Sam. 18:30)<shakal>
>
>1. What is a complex perfect in the suffix conjugation?
>
>2. Is this a valid category?
>



Dear Joseph,

In my view, there are two basic problems with present-day studies of the
Classical Hebrew verb:

1) There is little or no interest in studying the smallest linguistic
entities in their own right, but the focus is on groups of words, even at
the macro level.

2) Concepts such as "perfective", "imperfective" etc. (in the Germaic sense
of the words) are used as definitions of Hebrew verbs without any test as
to their applicability for Hebrew.

These problems can easily be solved by:

1a) A fundamental semantic unit (e.g. YIQTOL, QATAL and QOTEL) signals the
same *concept* (which was found in the minds of those with the same
presupposition pool /at a given time/) in any context. Sophisticated
methods to pin down the contents of this concept by its use in different
contexts should be designed (diachronic questions must of course be taken
into account, but so far I have not found evidence for any change in the
concepts signalled by the fundamental semantic units throughout the Tanach).

2a) Given that the present participle in English represents the
imperfective aspect and perfect the perfective one, the whole English
verbal system can be explained in quite an unambiguous way by the
interaction between tense and aspect. The tense shows the position of an
action in relation the the deictic point, and the aspect shows whether the
action was/will be in progress or was/will be finished at reference time.
If we apply this model to the Hebrew verb, we find that while many traits
of the English imperfective aspect are found in YIQTOL and many traits of
the perfective aspect in QATAL, the basic property is lacking. We cannot by
the use of YIQTOL and QATAL alone know whether a particular action was/will
be terminated or was/will be in progress at a certain reference time, as we
can by the use of the English aspects. WO is a very fine work that I
heartily recommend to my students. Their analyses of the function of verbs
in their different examples are excellent from an English grammatical point
of view. But because they use the English (or rather, "the general
linguistic") definition of aspect, we learn little about the nature of
Hebrew aspects by reading their work.

The term "complex (perfective)" may therefore be meaningful from an English
grammatical point of view ( and will of course tell us something about the
use of Hebrew verbs, because we can only think in terms of our own
language, and we use our own language as a point of reference), but the
term tells us nothing about Hebrew *perfectivity*.



Regards

Rolf



Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo