Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Sameer Yadav <sameer_yadav2 AT yahoo.com>]

Greetings, b-hebrew list-members!

I am a ThM student in a small S.Calif. seminary, and I
am presently beginning thesis work on the semantics of
modality in biblical Hebrew.

This well-trod ground is for me relatively new (but
exciting), and I writing to solicit help from the
Hebraists on this list whose work has centered on
mapping the semantics of tense, aspect, and mood to
the morpho-syntax of the verbal system.  In narrowing
the scope of my thesis I have taken my cues from G.
Hatav’s excellent dissertation work, which suggests
further study for the use of the suffixed form in
expressing the modality of counterfactuals, which is
also cited as a curious usage by Waltke and O’Connor. 


At present I am roadblocked by matters of approach –
my questions are these: 1) how do I go about selecting
an adequate corpus; 2) once I do, is there any
*computational* way to collect a complete data-set for
analyzing usage statistics, so that I can somehow
avoid combing through every single use of a qtl form? 
3) is the attempt to map the semantics of
counterfactuals to the morpho-syntax of the suffixed
conjugation somehow a misguided or a wrong-headed way
of handling a grammatical description?

Any suggestion in regard to any or all of these three
issues would be greatly appreciated, and I am grateful
for this forum in which to discuss these matters.

- Sameer Yadav


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