Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Peter,

I understand that your position is caused by your inductive approach to 
Hebrew verbs.  My different conclusion is caused by the approach of 
distinguishing between semantic meaning and conversational pragmatic 
implicature.  Less than one percent of all Hebrew verbs can be used to 
identify semantic meaning.  In my view a quality approach (semantics) is 
much better than a quantity approach (pragmatics).

Best regards

Rolf Furuli

University of Oslo

Peter Kirk wrote:

> On 16/09/2004 15:36, Rolf Furuli wrote:
>
> > ...
> > I define the similarities between English and Hebrew aspects this way:
> > "The imperfective aspect is a close-up view of a small section of the 
> > event where the progressive action is made visible.  The perfective 
> > aspect is a view, as if from some distance, of a great part of, or of 
> > the whole the event, where the progressive action is not made visible."
> >
> > ...
> >
> > ...  This means, for example, that when the end is made visible for 
> > the audience in each action expressed by WAYYIQTOLs in consecution, 
> > other factors than the aspect are used to make these ends visible.
> OK, Rolf, let's consider a typical series of WAYYIQTOL sentences 
> forming a sequence in a narrative context. The individual events are 
> typically passed over rather quickly with no interest in their 
> internal structure. By your definitions, WAYYIQTOL is supposed to be 
> imperfective. But how does this typical situation correspond with "a 
> close-up view of a small section of the event where the progressive 
> action is made visible"? It seems to me to correspond rather with the 
> opposite, "a view, as if from some distance, of a great part of, or of 
> the whole the event, where the progressive action is not made 
> visible", i.e. perfective.
>
> My view is that the very common WAYYIQTOL narrative sequence is the 
> prototypical example of the perfective aspect. Any attempt to redefine 
> "perfective" and "imperfective" to make this usage imperfective is 
> like trying to redefine "black" and "white" so that snow is black. 
> (And it doesn't help your argument that snow can sometimes be black, 
> for that is clearly a rare situation.) If you want an adjective which 
> describes both snow and soot, but not egrets' or crows' feathers, you 
> should avoid "black" and "white" and invent some different terminology.