Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment.

The problem as I see it with most treatments of the verbal system is 
that they insufficiently reckon with the shifting nature of the verbal 
system. That is, if we are correct in seeing a continuum from 
aspect-only-marking to tense-only-marking, most treatments seem to place 
the language as at entirely one end of the spectrum. The issue appears 
to be black-and-white for them and either-or, when in fact there would 
seem to be elements of truth to both: Hebrew moves from aspect-marking 
(so the aspectual treatments) to tense-marking (so the tense-marking 
treatments). For BH, we would appear to be in an intermediate stage, so 
either aspect-prominent (not aspect-only) or tense-prominent (not 
tense-only). (There is, however, a third "modality-prominent" option, 
but I leave that aside here.)

Regards,
David Kummerow.


> On 08/03/2007 23:10, David Kummerow wrote:
>  > Hi Karl,
>  >
>  > I agree.
>  >
>  > The point I wished to make was simply that there are exceptions for the
>  > aspect-only view to deal with. You have conceded this, I think.
>  > Similarly, there are exceptions for the tense-only view to deal with. If
>  > this is the scenario, could it be that BH does note COMPLETELY
>  > grammaticalise either? That is, is it possible for BH to be on the way
>  > to grammaticalising tense? Hence all the debate where both sides have
>  > latched onto part of the picture but perhaps not the entire picture? I
>  > prefer to see the language as tense-prominent rather than tense-only or
>  > aspect-only.
>  >
>  >
> It strikes me that there are very good reasons for a language to be, and
> remain fairly stably, in some mixture of tense-prominent and
> aspect-prominent. Efficient human communication needs to specify both
> tense and aspect, but certain combinations of these are more common than
> others. One strategy which some languages use, like Russian, and to a
> large extent Greek and English, is to have separate mechanisms for
> indicating tense and indicating aspect, allowing for a two-dimensional
> set of verb forms. But in Hebrew and other Semitic languages there are
> not two separate morphological or syntactic ways of distinguishing tense
> and aspect, and so the limited number of possible variations are
> distributed across the common combinations of tense and aspect, in a way
> which is not as neat and logical as the Russian system, or for that
> matter the English one. But the system does seem to work, although there
> does seem to have been a slow long term shift from what may well have
> been an originally completely aspectual system to the completely
> tense-based system of later Hebrew.