Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Rolf,

May I ask for some clarification here? Is Grice's principle, which you rely
on here, a definition or an assertion?

If it is simply a definition of "semantic meaning", serving to distinguish
it from "conversational pragmatic implicature", then I think you need to
recognise that your disagreement with Randall is over terminology rather
than substance. Clearly there are some phenomena which fit Grice's
definition, some uncancellable semantic meanings e.g. your example of "plod"
(I don't think anyone would argue with that), but Randall is talking also
about phenomena which do not.

If it is an assertion about everything which fits a wider definition of
"semantic meaning" (if so, what definition?), then I think you need to
realise that not everyone accepts this assertion. It is certainly true in
some cases e.g. "plod", but it would seem not to be true in other cases. It
is not enough for you to rely simply on the authority of Grice and Broman
Olsen, you need to justify their results.

I admire your work on analysing the Hebrew verb system in the light of
Grice's principle and Broman Olsen's system, which I accept as one
legitimate means of analysis among many. And you seem to have come to an
important result, if only a negative one, that within this scheme Hebrew has
neither grammaticalised tenses nor, according to the usual understanding,
grammaticalised aspects. So you conclude that the choice of verb form, for a
Hebrew speaker, was one of "conversational pragmatic implicature" or
"linguistic convention". That is an important result.

Now, does Broman Olsen's system allow you to analyse this "conversational
pragmatic implicature" or "linguistic convention", to elucidate why a
speaker would (generally if not always) choose a particular form in a
particular context? If so, I would be glad of an outline of how this could
be done. If not, it would seem to me that the system is somewhat lacking; it
has simply used Grice's principle to define as outside its scope a large
number of interesting linguistic questions, including almost all those
related to the biblical Hebrew verb system. Perhaps researchers would be
better advised to use a different system to analyse biblical Hebrew.

As for your final paragraph, does not Randall's Arabic example show that the
meaning of a verb phrase cannot always be broken down into the sum of the
meanings of its constituent parts? Since you reject modern Arabic examples
although you argue from English ones as well as Aramaic and Ugaritic ones,
let me quote one of your own English examples against you: "I had walked".
The word "had" in this sentence is clearly the past tense of the verb
"have", meaning "possess". So is it legitimate to insist that "I had walked"
means that I possessed something, perhaps a "walked thing" or a "walking
state"? No, this is simply an idiom, like a "hot dog" which is not a dog at
a high temperature. There are times, in linguistics as in other fields, when
the whole is not the sum of the parts.

Peter Kirk

----- Original Message -----
From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 5:24 PM
Subject: Re: vayyiqtol, assumption-rolf


Kimmo Huovila wrote,
<snip>

Dear Kimmo,

What you say above is exactly my point. it does not make sense to speak of
a durative verb being punctual. And my intention was therefore to argue for
the existence of fundamental linguistic units that can be said to represent
"semantic meaning", i.e. meaning that under no circumstances can be
canceled. Randall does not seem to accept the existence of such units. So
when we accept the elementary and fundamental principle, the question is
whether such verbs (with uncancelable meaning) do exist in reality, in
Hebrew. Grice's principle is that "semantic meanings may not be canceled
without contradiction or reinforced without redundancy." This means that
the features of the verbal system which in no context and under no
circumstances can be changed or canceled, represent semantic meaning, while
features that can be changed or canceled represent conversational pragmatic
implicature, even though they may seem to represent a uniform meaning.

 Broman Olsen (1997:17) uses an example with the word "plod". We can ask:
Are the concepts "slow" and "tired" a part of the «semantic meaning» of
"plod"? Look at the following clauses:

(1) Elsie plodded along, #but not slowly.
(2) Elsie plodded along, #slowly
(3) Margaret plodded along, although she was not tired.
(4) Margaret  plodded along; she was very tired.

Example (1) is contradictory, (2) is redundant, but (3) and (4) are normal.
This means that "slow" is a part of the semantic meaning of "plod" while
"tired" is conversational  pragmatic implicature.

<snip>

Regarding tense, Broman Olsen's scheme of semantic meaning is as follows:
Past tense: Reference time comes before the deictic point.
Present tense: RT coincides with C.
Future tense: RT comes after C.
This relationship is uncancellable, and it can be applied to Hebrew. If we
find one form with a particular morphology, to be a tense, its occurrences
should have a uniform pattern as to the relationship between RT and C. No
such form exists, and therefore Hebrew does not have grammaticalized tenses.


Regarding aspect, Broman Olsen's scheme for semantic meaning is as follows:
Imperfective aspect: RT intersects ET (event time) after the beginning but
before the end.
Perfective aspect: RT intersects ET at the coda.

<snip>

If we apply this aspect model to Hebrew, we will discover that no single
form codes for any of the aspects, because the relationship between ET and
RT is not uniform anywhere. However, it is possible on the basis of the
semantic aspect model to see a pattern of imperfective and perfective
characteristics, and therefore I claim that the two aspects do exist,
though in a somewhat different form.

My basic point, however, is that we cannot hope to find the meaning of the
Hebrew verbal system by starting at the top, either by discourse analysis
or by the method proposed by Randall. We must, as in the natural sciences,
try to identify the smallest linguistic units and find the meaning of
thsese. then we can proceed towards the top.



Regards

Rolf