Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Dale,

I studied Fanning thorougly fifteen years ago when I did some work on 
Greek aspects, but I have not opened his book in the ten years I have 
worked with my Hebrew dissertation. I do not think my Hebrew aspectual 
model has much in common with Fanning's model.

My problem when I am asked for a definition of Hebrew aspects, is that I 
can just give a sketch of my model, and that is likely to be 
misunderstood, because so much data is lacking.  In order to compare 
Hebrew and English aspects I have invented three parameters based on the 
intersection of ET by RT, and because there are two aspects, it is 
possible to compare the aspects of the two languages in six different 
areas.  In my dissertation I use 11 pages to discuss the application of 
these three parameters to the aspects, and even the main points cannot 
be conveyed in a short E-mail.

I would like to stress that my model does not build on vague expressions 
such as "internal" and "external," but I use the more specific 
linguistic concepts "reference time," "event time," and the "deictic 
center" as my tools.  On the basis of these three tools my three 
parameters are, 1) the quality of focus (the nature of what is made 
visible -details, progression etc.), the angle of focus (where RT 
intersects ET - this is the most important parameter), and 3) the 
breadth of focus (how broad area of ET that is made visible by the 
intersection of RT).  This is  a completely new approach to aspect study 
and is very different from Fanning's approach.

As to Greek aspects, I have not compared all the finite and infinite 
verbs of the NT, or a great portion of the verbs in classical Greek 
texts - which I would set as a requirement to have a well reasoned view 
of Greek aspects.  But the work I have done so far, suggests that Greek 
aspects are quite similar to Hebrew aspects and different from the 
English ones.  Complicating the matter is that tense is grammaticalized 
in Greek but not in Hebrew.  I take Greek present as the imperfective 
aspect and aorist as the perfective aspect, and tense is not a part of 
any of them. However, I take Greek imperfect as a combination of past 
tense and the imperfective aspect.  So far I am not sure what Greek 
perfect really is.  What is important in my view is that the angle of 
focus (all the different options for the intersection of ET by RT)  are 
similar in Greek and Hebrew.  And the same is true with the breadth of 
the focus caused by the intersection of ET by RT.  The fact that tense 
is grammaticalized is an additional factor, which does not disturb the 
picture mentioned, but it makes it harder to find examples that meet my 
basic requirement for aspectual identification.

I attempt to make a scrupulous distinction between semantic meaning and 
conversational pragmatic implicature, and this is a completely new 
approach in Hebrew studies.  To identify the semantic meaning of aspects 
I must find verbs where I with a reasonable certainty can know that a 
special characteristic is caused by the verb conjugation alone and not 
by a combination by lexical meaning, Aktionsart, Vendlerian 
characteristics and so on.  This is my basic requirement, and less than 
one percent of all Hebrew verbs meet this requirement. 

I will send you an article off-list with more explanations regarding 
aspects.


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


Dr Dale M Wheeler wrote:
Rolf:

Did you interact with B. Fanning, Verbal Aspect, at all?  What you seem 
to be describing is his terminology of "internal" vs "external" 
viewpoint, with the bounded vs unbounded having as much to do with the 
lexis of the verb being used as the tense/aspect being chosen.



**************************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Prof of Biblical Languages/Bible    Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street                 Portland, OR  97220
V: 503-251-6416                          E: dalemw AT multnomah.edu
**************************************************************************