Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 16/08/2005 01:40, Dave Washburn wrote:

> ...
>
> Call it bad grammar, or call it by the term you use below, "ungrammatical."  
> It amounts to the same thing, a construction that is outside the 
> generally-accepted bounds of what the society in question considers 
> "correct."  And it's hardly just a 19th century concept; submit an article to 
> a journal with half of the sentences reversed and see what kinds of "grammar 
> conventions" you run into.  As I already said, people have to use SOME rules 
> or conventions or whatever you choose to call them, else communication is not 
> possible.
>  

Dave, you and I agree that there are rules. But you seem to think that 
they are the kind of rules which can be written down in a textbook, as 
they were in the 19th century, rules which are still insisted on by 
certain editors even when they are entirely illogical like the split 
infinitive rule. I dispute this. I consider the rules of grammar to be 
much more fluid and context-dependent than these grammarians would ever 
admit. I am sure you can find whole discourses which are considered 
entirely grammatical as a whole but whose individual sentences would be 
considered ungrammatical out of context. How do your rules allow for that?

...

> > For one thing, there are well attested cases of words being used in
> > polar opposite senses distinguished only by context, such as XESED in
> > Hebrew and "wicked" in the dialect of English considered acceptable by
> > most young people. There is no reason why the same verb form cannot be
> > used for polar opposites - especially when one form is derived from two
> > different forms in an earlier stage of the language coming together.
> >    
>
> You forget one thing: you and I differ on the question of separation of syntax 
> and semantics.  I already mentioned changes in word meaning, and in the past 
> I have mentioned the polar-opposite meanings of "bad" that have come to be 
> accepted in American English.  Syntax is another matter, but since you don't 
> maintain a separation of the two, we won't get very far trying to discuss it.
>
>  
Well, you assert that what happens with words cannot happen with verb 
forms, and you can appeal to the authority of Chomsky if you want. But 
that doesn't make it true. Anyway, I thought that on your model the 
meaning of verb forms was a matter of semantics rather than syntax. Are 
you really saying that it is impossible for a single verb form to be 
used in two polar opposite ways, in terms of tense, aspect etc? I would 
be very surprised if this holds up to detailed comparison with the data 
from nearly 7000 languages. Are there really no languages anywhere in 
the world which use the same verb form for past and future, but not for 
present? Anyway, that is not the point. Clearly there are some languages 
which use the same verb form for sequential and non-sequential, as they 
don't mark for sequence at all. So you really don't have an argument 
against the hypothesis that Hebrew WAYYIQTOL sometimes markes for 
sequence but not always.

> ... If you have an idea in that direction, i.e. a specific 
> genre, setting, context or whatever where a writer would deliberately use a 
> sequential form in a non-sequential manner, a specialized usage context like 
> the historic present, I'd be very interested to hear it (I mean that, I'm not 
> being sarcastic).  I confess I haven't really explored such an idea myself, 
> but within the framework of a wayyiqtol = [+sequence] theory it could have 
> real possibilities.
>  

I don't have a theory at the moment, but you will find a lot of them in 
the literature, and in the archives of this list. One is that 
non-sequential WAYYIQTOL is used at the peak of a narrative. Another is 
that initial summaries or titles of pericopes are not always sequential, 
in that the title may be a WAYYIQTOL clause and the narrative may start 
with a WAYYIQTOL, but that does not imply that the event in the title 
(which is a summary of the whole pericope) is complete before the first 
event in the narrative - recently we had Genesis 37:21-24 as a possible 
example of this, with the first two clauses of v.21 as the title. Also, 
I would suggest that rather different rules apply in poetry, where there 
may also be some confusion with WEYIQTOL.

>  
>
> > ...
>
>
> Okay, in an old television show I saw once, a fellow was trying to memorize 
> some kind of training manual.  He had gone over it so much that he could 
> recite it forward and backward.  His girlfriend walked up with a basket on 
> her arm.  He said, "What do you have in the basket, Jane?"  Then he grinned 
> and said, "Basket the in have you do what, Jane?"  Nobody said this was bad 
> grammar.  Therefore it wasn't?  Or therefore we can't know for sure?  Or 
> therefore a linguist a thousand years from now when 1970's English is a dead 
> language can't know for sure?  Come on.
>
>  
Well, in the context of the show it is clearly indicated that this was 
bad grammar, even if not specifically stated. And there may be cases 
like that in the Hebrew Bible too. Are there cases of non-Israelites or 
people from remote areas speaking what looks like non-standard grammar? 
Maybe this was done deliberately as well. But my point is that we don't 
have access to native speaker intuition.

> ...  That's why I 
> hammer away so hard at the principle of Social Convention.  Without something 
> like it, you have chaos.  I don't think that's what you're claiming we have 
> in language, but it seems to me that you come close to it, at least in 
> theory. ...

Far from it. I accept that there are conventions in language, although I 
would call them linguistic conventions rather than social ones - 
especially as the word "social" suggests that your next step might be to 
formalise the convention and then stigmatise those who choose not to 
follow that formalisation as anti-social. More importantly, I also deny 
that they can be formalised. For one thing, they are very much dependent 
on the specific speaker and the specific audience. Private conversations 
between family members and close friends are often very far from 
following the linguistic conventions which would be needed for a public 
speech or lecture, or even for a conversation in a TV chat show which 
must be understood by the audience. For the people conversing privately 
can appeal to all kinds of shared understandings, and so can take all 
kinds of shortcuts. The same happens but to a lesser extent among in 
groups of people with the same interests and background. So, there is 
not one social or linguistic convention which can be formalised, but 
each communication scenario has its own conventions which can be 
negotiated. Unfortunately we just don't have enough knowledge to work 
out much of how this applies to Hebrew - although of course we can 
assume that the authors intended to use conventions which would be 
understood by their original audiences. We may see a bit of how it works 
if we examine reported conversations and the editorial explanations 
added to them for an audience which might not understand the original 
context.

> So, is a non-sequential wayyiqtol a construction that is outside the 
> bounds of Hebrew's social conventions of language for that time?  Once again, 
> call it what you wish.  My answer is still, I don't know.  At this point, I 
> believe there's a better explanation.  
>
>  
I agree on this. I think we can find that better explanation with a bit 
of work.

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



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