Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

On Friday 30 May 2003 03:46, Peter Kirk wrote:
> Dave, if you want to avoid trouble from the moderators I suggest you avoid
> implying that you understand this but the rest of us don't. Now you may
> understand Chomsky etc better than the rest of us except perhaps Liz, but
> there is more to understanding than Chomsky.
>
> If you wish to argue that within your particular framework there is a
> theoretical construct called "basic word order" and you are trying to
> determine that within your framework, then that's fine but say so. In that
> case criticisms of your framework are irrelevant. But the rest of us are
> free to ignore as irrelevant those results which depend on your framework
> and are meaningful only within it.

I thought I did say so.  That was the frustrating part.  And of course folks 
like you are free to reject the framework.  In your particular case, I'm 
hoping to find out why and what your alternative framework is.  I'm always 
interested in learning something new.

> As for your suggestion that basic word order can only be found in sentences
> without affixes, that doesn't really make sense. You will find hardly any
> such sentences in your already limited Hebrew corpus. You might find a few
> in English. In many languages the grammar implies that there are none at
> all. Anyway, I wouldn't call the Hebrew conjunction an affix, it is more
> like a clitic - though I agree that there is more going on in WAYYIQTOL.

We're agreed on the phenomenology of the wayyiqtol then.  I would include the 
weqatal in the category of "more going on," how about you?


-- 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur