Biblical Hebrew Forum

[decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca (Vincent DeCaen)]

anyone out there into formal semantics? i've been trying to model the 
consecutives in BH by playing with the propositional calculus. i believe 
that the following must be the key:

"sequence": A, followed by B

                FORM                    SEMANTICS?
english:        A and B                 A & B
hebrew:         A wayyiqtol B           A <--> B

similarly weqatal as A --> B

what's interesting about this approach is the difference between english 
and hebrew amounts to a morpheme virtually equivalent semantically to 
"then". that seems to be the intuition consistent with the traditional 
term "consecutive".

i believe, then, that this opens up a coherent model, incorporating 
truth-functional operators (crucially, "and", "then"), mood, tense. i've 
put together some notes if anyone wants to follow this up at

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/papers/truth_operators.doc

this is an MSWord.doc, if you have trouble with it, please let me know.

sholom,
V
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Dr Vincent DeCaen     <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>
c/o Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, 4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor
University of Toronto, Toronto ON, CANADA, M5S 1A1

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative, www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/hsei/
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