Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear David,

I start with a few questions: Do you agree with Comrie that some languages
do not have tenses (grammaticalized location in time), such as Burmese?
If you do, you agree that the narrative form in such a language does not
represent past tense. So I ask:  Why should it be impossible that the
narrative form in such a language should be imperfective? To apply this to 
Hebrew I ask; Why can´t WAYYIQTOL be in imperfective form? Is there anything 
in the texts we have which would forbid that?

We may perhaps differ as to the definition of tense. We agree that 
grammaticalisation processes may occur in a language over time:  A 
particular verb form becomes more and more restricted as to it use until it 
only is used in one way, for example having only past reference. At that 
point first the form represent "grammaticalised location in time". It seems 
that you do not accept this definition, since you speak of  "the dominant 
use" as evidence for tense. For example, the English verbs "went" and 
"spoke" have an intrinsic past tense and the forms are grammaticalised 
location in time. Past reference is not "the dominant use" of "went" and 
"spoke," it IS their use. In hypothetical conditional clauses and some other 
special clauses the verbs can be used in a non-past context, but their past 
reference is non-cancellable.

The "dominant use" of a verb does not tell much without a careful analysis. 
For example, it has often been argued that the basis for the WAYYIQTOL is a 
short prefix form, since apocopation is a characteristic of the WAYYIQTOL, 
as you also say. But what is the "dominant use"? My analysis of all 
WAYYIQTOLs of the Tanakh gave the result that only 27% were apocopated, so 
in most cases WAYYIQTOL is long. However, a careful analysis indicates that 
most of the long WAYYIQTOLs cannot be apocopated because of their consonants 
suffixes etc. So the "dominant use" tells us little as far as semantics is 
concerned. Therefore, I agree that the WAYYIQTOL tend to be short when 
possible. In my analysis of all the finite and infinite verbs of the Tanakh 
I obtained the following numbers regarding past reference:

QATAL:             7,446      53.5 %
WEQATAL           357      5,9 %
YIQTOL            1,027       7.5 %
WEYIQTOL           50       4.4 %
WAYYIQTOL    13,539     93.1 %
Part act                 1,739    32.7 %
Part pass                 364    33.1 %
Infin con.                760    57.2 %
Infin abs                   86    29.8 %

What do these numbers tell us? Very little before they are carefully 
analysed. In my view the "dominant use"-arguments are fallacious, since they 
only relate to quantity (pragmatics) and not to quality (semantics). For 
example, according to my analysis there are 997 WAYYIQTOLs with non-past 
reference, and they cannot be ignored. If these (or a reasonable numberof 
them, to allow differences in interpretation) have non-past reference and 
occur in normal contexts, the WAYYIQTOL cannot represent past tense. And 
similarly with the 965 (6.9 %) QATALs with future reference, they show that 
the QATAL do not represent past tense.

No interpretation of a dead language is final, there certainly are 
alternative interpretations. The good advice to the student is to look at 
the methodlologies behind the interpretations.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Kummerow" <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2007 10:19 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)


> Hi Rolf,
>
> I do not think that it follows that "we cannot draw the conclusion that
> the Hebrew WAYYIQTOL is a past tense or is perfective on the basis of
> its function." To me it only shows that the issue is complex in
> Phoenician regarding the infinitive and less so for Hebrew wayyiqtol.
> The conclusion you draw doesn't necessary have to follow. So I disagree:
> I think we can label Hebrew wayyiqtol on the basis of its
> dominant/prototypical function - narrative past tense. Regarding the
> Phoenician infinitive absolute, what is its dominant function? If it is
> indeed used dominantly as a past tense, then the possibility is there
> for the grammaticalisation of it as Peter suggested. Also, since the
> infinitive is unmarked for PNG, then it could possibly be used in
> narrative as a topic-continuity construction. You see, there are other
> alternatives than the outright rejection of more traditional proposals.
>
> Regards,
> David Kummerow.