Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Peter,

You paint a carricature of my position. In view of all the times we have
discussed Hebrew verbs, you should be able to do better. I do not deny
exceptions and a substandard use of language. What I challenge is ad hoc
explanations in order to save a hypothesis. Therefore I make a linguistic
demand that exceptions must be explained. For example, In the 19th century
QATAL was viewed as past tense, and at the end of the century, as past tense
or the perfective aspect. It was discovered that several QATALs had future
reference, and in order to save the theory, the "prophetic perfect" was
postulated, the action was completed in the mind of the prophet. (A. B.
Davidson (1894) "Hebrew syntax") is a good example. The view has later been
parroted by different grammarians, but I have never seen anyone proving the
claim.

The principle of a property being uncancellable is very simple: Even a
shoolboy understands that the clauses "I will come yesterday" and "I came
tomorrow" are ungrammatical. There is no purpose in trying to find a special 
situation where one of the clauses can be used.

If QATAL represents past tense, a reasonable number cannot have future
reference. If we find 1,000 examples of QATAL future reference, these are
too many to say they are exceptions. The fact that some words have a
substandard use is not relevant in the literary text of the Tanakh, and
neither is the fact that words may behave strange in strange contexts. We
cannot argue that the "dominant use" of the QATAL is past (53.5 %  have past
reference), therefore it is a past tense. Even though we reduced the number
with future references to 500 or 300, and they occurred in normal contexts,
still we could not accept that QATAL is a past tense. The only way to uphold
the past tense view of QATAL would be to demonstrate (not just claim) that
the examples with future reference were exceptions. That would include
showing how and why they were exceptions.

The points above do not indicate a static view of language. In my
dissertation there is a detailed analysis of Hebrew verbs from a diachronic
point of view. The conclusion is that while the language to some extent do 
change in the
youngest books of the Tanakh, the evidence is that the meaning of the verbs
has not changed.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
Univeersity of Oslo

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Kirk" <peter AT qaya.org>
To: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
Cc: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 11:43 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Verbal Aspect (was Tenses - Deut 6:4)


> 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/