Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Rolf,

Would the sentence you quoted a few days ago,

"Crossing the floor, he opened the cupboard"

be a counter-example to the situation you describe? This has a verb form
"crossing" which usually represents the imperfective aspect, but it seems to
me that in this case "reference time intersects event time at the coda". If
so, Broman Olsen's theory is falsified for English as it is really spoken
and written, and applies only to the idealised and sanitised English which
Dave Washburn does not call "bad". That would hardly be a surprise. Real
language, as opposed to artificial constructs, just does not fit nicely with
absolute categories like "non-cancellable", it has a strong tendency to
squeeze its way past such theoretical constraints.

Peter Kirk

----- Original Message -----
From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2000 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: Linguistic assumptions, long (Rolf, also Dave)


> Dear Clay,
>
> I am not sure who the people you mention are and what is the sense of
> "'core' of semantic-functional significance". But regarding aspect, the
> situation i simple as far as English is concerned.  The characteristic of
> the imperfective aspect (not only  its 'core'), represented by present
> participle, is that reference time intersects event time at the nucleus
> (before the end). The characteritic of the perfective aspect, represented
> by the perfect, is that reference time intersects event time at the coda.
> This is a non-cancelable relationship because it is always like that.
> Therefore Broman Olsen uses the term "semantic meaning".
>
> The definition is very clear, and it can be falsified by finding examples
> where the relationship between ET and RT is different from the definition.
> We cannot presume that the situation in Hebrew is similar to English, but
> because the definition is so clearcut, I cannot think of a better model by
> which to test Hebrew aspect.
>
>
> Regards
> Rolf
>
>
> Rolf Furuli
> University of Oslo
>
<snip>