Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Peter,

I see I did not manage to get my message across. It does not seem that 
you ever have tried to make a scrupulous distinction between semantic 
meaning and conversational pragmatic implicature and understand the 
principles behind this.

I do not say that less than one per cent of the WAYYIQTOLs and other 
verbs argue for my conclusions and more than 99 per cent against.  For 
example, I have a list of exactly 3,550 participles and infinitives 
functioning as finite verbs, signalling past events that were completed 
at speech time.  By the same criteria you use to conclude that the 
WAYYIQTOLs are perfective, all these infinite forms must be perfective 
as well.  But nobody would claim that.  I have a list of 1,027 YIQTOLs 
that would be taken as perfective by the same criteria as well.  There 
are also thousands of WAYYIQTOLs of different kinds that argue against 
their perfectivity.  But all these werbs tell us what the WAYYIQTOLs are 
*not*, but they do not tell what the WAYYIQTOLs *are*.

And here are my "less than one percent of the verbs" pertinent.  In 
order to show the real nature of a conjugation, we need a verb occurring 
in a context where we can be certain that its imperfective 
characteristics are caused by its conjugation alone, and not by other 
linguistic factor alone, or by the interplay of such factors.  Examples 
meeting such strict criteria are few indeed -- less than one percent.

I have lectured about my verbal model for groups of scholars, and I do 
not expect that the model immediately should be accepted, or necessarily 
accepted at all.  But frankly speaking, I am surprised to find how 
difficult it is to be able to have a meaningful discussion regarding 
the  linguistic principles at stake.  It seems to me that very few 
professors of Semitic languages are able to fathom that there is a 
distinction between semantic ( uncancellable) factors inside a language 
and pragmatic factors.  This seems to be something they never have 
thought of.  So it is high time that linguistics are introduced into 
Semitic studies.

BTW,  the verb MWT was not viewed as punctiliar in the Hebrew mind.  
Because punctiliarity is not semantic meaning but conversational 
pragmatic implicature,  I am not aware of a single method by the help of 
which you can point to a verb and say, "this Hebrew verb is 
punctiliar".  Hebrew verbs can be marked for durativity, dynamicity 
(change), and telicity, properties that are taken as semantic meaning, 
but I have never seen proofs that the same is true for punctiliarity.


Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo

Peter Kirk wrote:

> On 17/09/2004 09:01, Rolf Furuli wrote:
>
> > 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).
> OK. But if you develop a model based on your 1% of verbs which is then 
> contradicted by a large part of the 99%, surely there is something 
> wrong with the model. I would accept that in 1% of WAYYIQTOLs the 
> internal structure may be visible. But in 99%, or at least 90%, there 
> is no indication of any kind of interest in the internal structure. 
> But according to your model the aspect is semantic and so 
> uncancellable. So you end up with the reductio ad absurdum that in a 
> narrative passage with WAYYIQTOLs like Jonah 1:3 (chosen largely at 
> random) there is forced to be an interest in the internal structure of 
> no less than five successive events, some of which are more or less 
> punctiliar; whereas you are left with no way which is actually used 
> for the author to narrate a series of actions whose internal structure 
> is not made visible.
>
> How do you deal with WAYYIQTOL forms of verbs which are strictly 
> punctiliar, like the rather common WAYYAMOT "and he died"? How can 
> these be imperfective?