Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 24/03/2007 08:55, Rolf Furuli wrote:
> ... clauses which are so restricted that we, with a good measure of 
> certainty, can say that a certain property  is a semantic part of the verb 
> form itself and is not caused by the context, are very few. ...

Thank you for clarifying this statement, with which I can agree if we 
use your definition of "semantic". So we have very few properties which 
we know to be semantic. But for a language to be useful for 
communication it must have quite a lot of properties which are semantic; 
but in the case of biblical Hebrew and using your definitions, we cannot 
know that they are semantic. It is a simple matter of probability, 
surely, that a good proportion of the properties which have been alleged 
to be semantic, but which cannot be proved to be semantic, are in fact 
semantic although (in the absence of mother tongue speakers) not 
provably so. The implication of this is that it is very dangerous to 
slide from "not provably semantic" to "not semantic". So, it seems to me 
that you need to take more care to avoid saying that some property is 
not semantic but a matter of linguistic convention, unless you have 
actually proved that it is not semantic.

I wonder, would you also agree with the opposite of your statement, that 
clauses of which we can say with a good measure of certainty that a 
certain property is NOT semantic are very few?

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