Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Gary Long" <glong AT bethel.edu>]

I'm a new-ish subscriber to this particular list so forgive redundancy.

I'd simply like to point toward John A. Cook's 2002 Wisconsin-Madison
dissertation, written under (my former classmate) Cynthia Miller, "The
Biblical Hebrew Verbal System: A Grammaticalization Approach." It's out or
is due to be out in published form, so far as I know, in the Linguistic
Studies in Ancient West Semitic series. He concludes some interesting and,
in my opinion, lucid thoughts about the verbal system. About the wayyiqtol,
I understood him to argue that it DOES commonly convey past TENSE within the
primarily ASPECTUAL world of prefix/"imperfect" and suffix/"perfect"
conjugations.

Gary A. Long
Bethel University