Biblical Hebrew Forum

[furuli AT online.no]

Dear Peter,

Since we disagree regarding fundamental linguistic principles and 
draw completely different conclusions from the same data (e.g. 
Phoenician infinitive absolutes), I see no reason to continue this 
discussion. But of course, I respect your scholarship.


Best regards

Rolf

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




> On 23/05/2004 10:51, furuli AT online.no wrote:
>
> > ...
> >
> > In many cases the distinction between semantic meaning and 
> > conversational  pragmatic implicature is difficult to establish. 
> > But Peter draws this too far, because there are many areas of 
> > language where the difference is clear-cut, as in connection with 
> > verbs. Of course, falsifying examples must have a secure foundation 
> > (textually, contextually etc), and even exceptions can be allowed 
> > if they can be linguistically explained. But the main proposition 
> > stands: A verb conjugation which semantically represents past tense 
> > cannot have future reference.
>
>
> So, Rolf, are you making the claim that if a language has a true 
> past tense that can NEVER be used with a future reference? Would 
> you, I wonder, accept that English has a true past tense (or perhaps 
> more than one, but let's stick to the simple past for now)? What 
> would you do if I found secure counter-examples? Would you abandon 
> or modify your "main proposition"? Or would you decide that English 
> has no more of a past tense than Hebrew does? By this kind of 
> argument we could probably demonstrate quite quickly that there are 
> no past tenses in any language, except perhaps in certain dead 
> languages in which there is insufficient data to falsify the 
> hypothesis.
>
> Of course you have left yourself a get-out clause that "exceptions 
> can be allowed if they can be linguistically explained". So then, 
> would you like me to offer linguistic explanations for your non-past 
> WAYYIQTOLs? We have been through this before, and I found none which 
> don't have convincing to me linguistic (or textual) explanations. 
> Many can be explained as future perfects, perhaps even "prophetic 
> perfects". And in rather a lot of the cases we looked at before the 
> temporal reference of the events is highly uncertain.
>
> > The fact that the infinitive absolute is used for narrative 
> > accounts in Phoenician, and to some degree in the Amarna letters, 
> > has no direct bearing on the falsification principle. But this fact 
> > illuminates the case with the WAYYIQTOLs from another angle.  If 
> > infinitive absolutes, which nobody would say semantically represent 
> > past tense, are used as the narrative verb form, then the 
> > WAYYIQTOLs neither need to represent semantically past tense, just 
> > because they in great numbers are used in narrative accounts. Why 
> > some say they cannot understand this simple fact is difficult for 
> > me to understand.
> While I would not say "semantically", I would suggest that a 
> Phoenician verb form used regularly in past contexts, whatever its 
> Hebrew cognates, is a past tense.
>
> As for swans, suppose that I am describing a beautiful riverside 
> scene. Swans were gliding past, and the flowers on the bank matched 
> the swans' feathers. What colour were the flowers? Of course, they 
> were white, because in this scenario the swans, unless otherwise 
> specified as black, are assumed to be white (except perhaps by 
> readers in Western Australia, where swans are prototypically black). 
> And it is not just pragmatics which tells us that the flowers were 
> white, it is the semantics of the whole text.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter AT qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/