Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Dave,

See my comments below.



>Rolf,
>> Let us use the English present participle as an example. The core of its
>> semantic meaning is "ongoing action". It can be used as a verb, adjective
>> or substantive - this is function - but it's semantic meaning is unchanged.
>
>I have to disagree.  The core of the English present participle is
>description.  It cannot be used absolutely as a verb, only as a
>periphrastic, and its function is always to modify something,
>whether a noun, a verb or a clause.  The fact that you see it as
>"ongoing action" and I see it as "description" illustrates how
>tenuous your "semantic meaning" or "uncancellable meaning" is.
>In addition, continuing to try and describe grammatical functions in
>semantic terms only muddies the waters; it is not until we look at
>syntax and semantics separately that we can develop a unified
>view of the various uses of the various verbal forms.  Speaking of
>the "semantic meaning" of a grammatical form won't get us
>anywhere, IMO.

The ideal situation for linguists is to work with minimal pairs, where
there is just one difference, and a difference in meaning must be due to
this one difference. When we have two differences, there are two possible
reasons for a difference in meaning. The higher we come up in the
linguistic hierarchy, the more possible factors can influence function and
meaning. It is therefore an advantage to work at the bottom.

There have been scores of fine studies of the Hebrew verb that should be
read by those being interested in the subject. But all these make several
assumptions that never have been tested. Assumptions must be made, but some
time some of the assumptions themselves should be tested. This is my angle
of approach, and therefore I try to find the smallest unities having
semanitic meaning. To know that neither punctuality nor stativity is
pragmatic and not semantic in Hebrew,but to know that durativity,
dynamicity, and telicity are semantic, is very important for finding the
fundamental meaning of Hebrew verbs. And further, to be able to find the
semantic relationship of the different tenses (based on the relation
between RT and C) is important if we want to find out whether Hebrew has
tenses or not. And lastly, to know the semantic relationship between the
aspects of English and other languages (based on the relationship between
ET and RT) is important if we want to find out whether Hebrew has aspects.
Your approach based on Chomsky is a legitimate way to study Hebrew verbs,
but my approach which focuses on the small units is also legitimate.

The semantic relationship between the aspects in English, is that RT of the
imperfective aspect (represented by present participle) intersects ET at
the nmucleus, while RT of the perfective aspect (represented by perfect)
intersects ET at the coda. In this relationship does the participle express
ongoing action. I would not dispute that the participle in other context
can be seen as "description".


>
>> It can even be used as implicature. A friend of mine who completed her
>> Ph.D. had the following clause in her corpus: "crossing the floor, he
>> opened the cupboard". Even though the meaning was that he opened the
>> cupboard after having crossed the floor, the semantic meaning of the
>> participle was not changed, and this seemingly contrafactual use could be
>> explained pragmatically.
>
>This is actually "bad" English.  Proper English would say "having
>crossed the floor, he opened the cupboard."  The present participle
>makes it sound as though he took hold of the cupboard door and
>opened it while he was still halfway across the room and walking
>toward the cupboard.  I would file this one under Randall's
>exceptions, most of which fall into the category of "bad" grammar.
>It's hard to build an understanding of a verbal form based on its
>misuse.


I am not a native speaker so I have no authoritative intuition. I reacted
as you do at the seminar where this mentioned clause was discussed. But I
was assured that it worked in this special context. I myself used it in
this discussion as an extreme example.


Regards

Rolf



Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo