Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 18/09/2004 16:49, C. Stirling Bartholomew wrote:

> On 9/17/04 3:52 PM, "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org> wrote:
>
>  
>
> > I am reminded of the lecturer in
> > semantics who claimed that in some languages two negatives make a
> > positive, and in some two negatives make a negative, but there are no
> > languages in which two positives make a negative. To which a student
> > replied "Yeah, right".
> >    
>
> Peter,
>
> This is a great illustration. It proves an important point that wasn't
> particularly on my mind. I though we were talking about the semantic
> significance of aspectual marking. I wasn't arguing that the semantic value
> of a lexeme is *vacuous. ...

OK. My point was that even with lexemes the notion of uncancellable 
semantic meaning is, well I wouldn't say vacuous but misguided, that 
there is very little if anything which is strictly uncancellable. And if 
this is true of lexemes, surely it is a fortiori of verb forms.

> ... But when it comes to things like imperfect and
> perfect aspectual marking I wonder if we should not be looking for discourse
> structural function rather than meaning. Again, the division here is between
> syntax and semantics. Defining syntax as anything that determines structural
> relationships within a discourse.
>  

I agree that we should be looking at this from a different angle, but 
I'm not sure what.

> All attempts I have seen to fix an invariant meaning on the hebrew aspectual
> markings seem to end up ship wrecked. Could these folks be barking up the
> wrong tree? 
>
>  
Yes, but which is the right tree? Well, it seems to me that a start 
would be to abandon the notion of "invariant" or "uncancellable". 
Perhaps (rather off the top of my head) we should see the different verb 
forms, in Relevance Theory terms, as helping to select between various 
interpretations which might be relevant in the context, to find which is 
the most relevant. Does that sound like a promising approach?

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/