Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • To: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)
  • Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 11:43:21 +0000

On 05/03/2007 11:06, Rolf Furuli wrote:

... In my view the "dominant use"-arguments are fallacious, since they only relate to quantity (pragmatics) and not to quality (semantics). ...

In my view your "uncancellable" arguments are fallacious, because they imply a static view of language, as something which obeys certain rules without exceptions, which simply does not apply to real language. The consequence of applying your method to real text corpora of any size, in any language, is that exceptions are found to every proposed rule, and therefore nothing is uncancellable and so by your argument nothing is semantic, everything is pragmatics. Now maybe there is something in that final conclusion. But you need to realise that your arguments that WAYYIQTOL is not a semantically distinct verb form can be applied to pretty much any verb form in any language, at least for which there is adequate evidence.

Even your example "the English verbs "went" and "spoke" have an intrinsic past tense and the forms are grammaticalised location in time" is by no means absolute, for you are sure to be able to find a minority of uses (even if they are considered non-standard by prescriptive grammarians, and quite apart from the special cases which you mention) in which they are used with non-past meanings. And by the way, in hypothetical conditional clauses like "If he went to the theatre this evening, he would see..." (spoken of someone who has made a definite decision not to go), there is no past tense meaning component to "went" and so the past reference is entirely cancelled. So, by your arguments, the English past "tense" is entirely pragmatic.

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter AT qaya.org
Blog: http://www.qaya.org/blog/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page