Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Kimmo,

Thank you for clarifying many things here, and especially for explaining
more clearly what events can be considered punctual.

But after looking at the definitions you quote, I wonder if there are any
truly punctual events. Your best example of punctuality, "the cable
snapped", is not truly punctual. It does have an internal structure: a crack
opens up in the metal of a the cable and takes a finite time to cross it.
With an actual metal chain this time is likely to be too quick to be
consciously discerned, but this is simply because of the material. Indeed,
physics tells us that no event takes place truly instantaneously, all events
have duration. We cannot say "the cable snapped for two nanoseconds", but we
can say "the cable was snapping for two nanoseconds", with the implication
that the load was then removed so that the snapping process did not
continue. In the sentence

"The boy sat on the branch. But he soon realised that the branch was
snapping, so he jumped off it."

"snap" is not punctual, and is imperfective. As the material is different,
the time taken to snap is discernable. In this scenario, probably the branch
did not snap off completely, but it was damaged. Of course this is
comparable with the sentence

"When the doctor arrived the woman was dying, but he managed to save her
with a new wonder drug."

Then how about this one?

"When we got to the casualty ward the woman was dying. Her heart had just
stopped, and the doctors were trying to resuscitate her by pounding her
chest and with electric shocks, but to no avail."

Is "die" punctual in these contexts? It is certainly imperfective.

My conclusion: punctuality is not an absolute (or uncancellable) binary
category, it is a continuum, so that if we look closely enough any event has
internal structure.

Peter Kirk


----- Original Message -----
From: Kimmo Huovila <kimmo.huovila AT helsinki.fi>
To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2000 8:01 AM
Subject: Linguistic assumptions, long (Rolf, also Dave)


<snip>

(Some authors, e.g. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in NT Greek, p. 150, do give
positive tests of punctuality: "I bought this book at five o'clock", but
"*I read this book at five o'clock." Yet this hardly disproves my point.
The issue with this test of Fanning's is not aspect per se, but our
knowledge of the world. "I drank a glass of water at five o'clock."
would be OK, just because it takes less time, not because the aspect is
different.)

The situation would be opposite if we were to define durativity as a
semantic feature that specifies that the activity is predicated to have
taken time, and punctuality as the converse, then any durative verb
could also be punctual (eg. 'I sang' - it is not predicated as taking up
time any more that the usual example of punctuality 'the cable snapped';
we are just relying on our knowledge of the world, and perhaps partly on
the fact that 'snapped' does not allow for a durative interpretation
(thus being a counter-example to your claim that any punctual verb can
be durative).).

<snip>

Dave Washburn wrote:

> Could you give a constructed
> > example of a sentence that would demonstrate a punctual use of 'run' or
> > 'sing'?
>
> "He ran to the door."  "She sang one staccato note."

Punctuality does not mean short duration. Our knowledge of real world
events does not necessarily correspond to linguistic punctuality. If
'the cable snapped' is punctual, we still could analyse the time that it
took for the cable to emit the sound. However, if we try something like
'the cable snapped for two milliseconds', we have made an iterative
expression or we mean that the results of the snapping remained for two
milliseconds. Punctuality means that the event cannot be predicated over
time. Durativity is its converse. "She sang one staccato note." is no
more punctual than "she sang five arias." Both can take an adverbial of
minimum duration ("she sang five arias for twenty minutes."; "She sang
one staccato note for X time" (I do not know how long it would take)).
(The
aspectual behavior of such sentences is not adequately handled by just
analyzing punctuality here. Something happens also to perfectivity when
we add the adverbial of minimum duration. Here the concept of nesting
helps.)

Well, Dave, if you want to define punctuality so that your senteces are
punctual, feel free to do so. However, I assume that Rolf would not
consider these sentences (in English or Hebrew) to be counter-examples
to his theory. The definition I gave above is roughly the one I have
seen most used. I do not claim it to be sacrosanct.

P.H. Matthews defines punctual as "marking an action, etc. taking place
at an undivided moment of time" (Concise Dictionary of Linguistics).

Comrie defines punctual as follows:
"The opposite of durativity is punctuality, which thus means the quality
of a situation that does not last in time (is not conceived of as
lasting in time), one that takes place momentarily. It should be noted
that the crucial point here is that punctual situations do not have any
duration, not even duration of a very short period. Thus a punctual
situation, by definition, has no internal structure, and in a language
with separate imperfective forms to indicate reference to the internal
structure of a situation, then clearly punctuality and imperfectivity
will be incompatible." Aspect, p. 42.

Frawley's definition: "If an event is momentary and has no temporal
duration, it is punctual; if it is necessarily distributed over time, it
is durative." Linguistic Semantics, p. 306.

>
> Next question.

Would you explain the whole universe and give two good examples? :-)

Kimmo