Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Verb Inflection & Tense

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verb Inflection & Tense
  • Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 08:07:20 +0100

Dear Kevin,

Your points below regarding Polynesian and Austronesian are informative. But there is one problem, which I comment on below.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Kevin Riley" <klriley AT alphalink.com.au>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005 5:01 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verb Inflection & Tense


I have been away, and I prefer not to reply to posts from which the group
has moved on, but I'll make an exception for this one.

-------Original Message-------

From: Vadim Cherny
Date: 09/18/05 15:58:44

Jack,

You well may be right, I don't have a clue about Tagalog.
It could be, however, that the same bias affected its study, as was for
Hebrew.
I guess, Polynesians don't have a large body of written literature, and are
generally moderately educated (a guess, not an assertion), and cannot very
well relay to scholars and translators subtle semantical differences, such
as between tenses and the completion aspects.

********************
Your guesses are badly off on all of the above. There are quite a number of
Polynesians who are very well educated, including in the field of
linguistics. It's been said many times that one of the problems with
Biblical Hebrew is that we don't have living speakers to ask - that is not a
problem with almost all the Polynesian languages. Some of them have even
written accounts of their studies - usually in English for the benefit of
those who don't speak a Polynesian language so you should have no trouble
finding them and reading them before making assertions about Polynesian
languages and their speakers. I would suggest Bruce Biggs' [not a
Polynesian] "Let's Learn Maori" and Winifred Bauer's "Maori" for Maori, and
Samuel Elbert and Mary Pukui's "Hawai'ian Grammar" for Hawai'ian as good
places to start. I think they may convince you that it is aspect, not tense
that is gramaticalised. Or maybe you will just come up with your own
theory to prove you are right and they are wrong.

********************

Myself, I don't see major difference between completed aspect ('having
studied') and the past tense. I cannot imagine how scholars could establish
that Polynesians mean aspect, not tense in this case. For example, consider
a hypothetical Polynesian who studied but did not graduate. If Tagalog has
aspects, that Polynesian should use imperfect in describing his studies. My
guess, he would use perfect - which would therefore be not perfective
aspect, but past tense.

I agree that scholars would have great problems in distinguishing between "completed aspect" and "past tense" in the situation you mention. But the reason for the problem is not that this distinction cannot be made in a living or a dead language, but rather that assumptions that need not be correct are used. Thus, the problem may be theoretical rather than practical.

A colleague of mine who has spent many years among native speakers on islands in the Pacific ocean, and who is an expert of the native languages, said to me two weeks ago: "It is high time that we abandon the tranditional definitions of aspects with their Slavic origin in the study of the Pacific languages. These definitions simply prevent progress in the language studies."

It is very important to realize that while tense is a universal term, which means that its nature can be understood even in languages that do not have grammticalized tenses, aspectual definitions are not universal. So the problem of distinguishing between "completed aspect" and "tense," as mentioned above, is the application of the English aspectual model to the languages of the Polynesians.

There is a simple model by which tense and aspect can be distinguished in any language without looking at the foreign lnguage in the light of one`s own language:

1) Use a corpus with a huge number of verbs (more than ten thousand verbs is preferable).
2) Find out whether verbs with the same morphology systematically refer to the future or to the past (smaller explainable exceptions are accepted). If not, tense is not grammticalized in that language.
3) Find out whether verbs with the same morphology systematically refer to completed or uncompleted events (smaller explainable exceptions are accepted). If not, aspects in the traditional sense is not grammaticalized in that language.

I have made these tests for classical Hebrew (my corpus had 79,574 verbs), and my finds are negative. Neither tense nor aspect (with the definitions completed/incomplete or complete/incomplete) are grammacalized in classical Hebrew. This is the falsification part of the approach based on the hypothetic deductive method. But there is a positive part as well.

4) Use the parameters "event time," "reference time" and "deictic center". Find out whether reference time intersects event time in a systematically different way in verbs with one morphology in contrast with verbs with another morphology. If that is the case, the language probably has aspects, and their nature must be defined on the basis of the nature of this intersection of event time by reference time *in that language*.

In a living language this model is easy to apply, because we have informants. In a dead language, the situation is more difficult, and only in a few clear-cut cases (hundreds rather than thousands) can the test of the intersection of event time by reference time be applied. In the other cases we can only use the cruder test of the relationship between event time and the deictic center.

The basic problem in studies of Hebrew verbs is that we apply an aspectual model construed on the basis of aspects in English, Russian, or nother languages, instead of testing the possible aspects in Hebrew in their own right. For example, many students of Hebrew use as a premise in their study that WAYYIQTOL, which, for the most part portray past, completed actions, either MUST be past tense or express the perfective aspect. Any claim that WAYYIQTOL is imperfective is unacceptable and will be rejected. However, in the Phoenician Karatepe inscriptions, the infinitive absolue plays the same role as WAYYIQTOL in Hebrew. There are 16 infinitive absoluts with prefixed WAW and 5 without prefixed WAW that describe past, completed events. No one would claim that the infinitive absolute has an intrinsic past tense or perfectivity. Yet, it functions as if that was the case! The lesson we can learn is that we cannot know the intrinsic meaning of verb forms by looking at them from the outside, i.e., by looking at their functions. The reason is that the functions of verbs in most cases are pragmatically conditioned, i.e., the reason for the choice of verb is the context. We therefore need to look for clauses that are so clear-cut that the particular functions of the verb with a great deal of certainty can be said to come from the nature of the verb alone. I have done this test in classical Hebrew, and my conclusion is that WAYYIQTOL, WEYIQTOL, and YIQTOL are imperfective, i.e., the intersection of event time by reference time in a few hundred clear-cut cases is systematically different (and qualifes for the definition "imperfective") from the intersection in QATAL and WEQATAL.

But please note: In order to test these conclusions one has to get rid of the straightjacked of the traditional aspectual definitions. One must start afresh with the fundamental parameters "reference time," "event time," and "deictic center" and try hard to conduct the study with as little prejudice as possible.




*******************
Then, of course, he [or she, Polynesian females also aspire to studying] may
not see the need to indicate either perfection or imperfection. There are
languages that allow for a verb to be marked merely as a verb, without
indicating tense or aspect. The Maori 'ka' indicates that what follows is a
verbal phrase, without any reference to time. It is sometimes referred to
as 'inceptive', as it is always used when a new action is beginning, but is
not restricted to that context. Or the perfect 'kua' could be used, as the
studying is finished [one need not graduate to finish studying]. 'kua' can
also be used with adjectives to say what they are now [present tense, no?]
if their present state is the result of a process - 'old' is a good example.
The imperfective 'e ... ana' could be used if the studying is viewed as
ongoing [as in 'while I was studying...']. Whether or not the student
graduated is irrelevant, as it would be in most languages. That most of the
verbal particles can be used with words like 'yesterday', 'today', 'tomorrow
and in contexts that are obviously past, present, or future, would indicate
tthey are not tenses, but aspects.

And, while the Tagalog and Polynesians are all speakers of Austronesian
languages, the Tagalog are not Polynesians, but Malayan [Indonesian??].
Your assertions might be better listened to if you demonstrated you know
something about the subject.

Kevin Riley

**********************
Vadim Cherny




Best regards

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page