Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Rolf wrote:-

>Tenses and aspects have special uses, but these do not cancel their
>properties. nontheless, such special cases are sometimes used to argue
>that semantic meaning does not exist. In Norway we have a special polite
>expression, as seen in 3). Regardless of whether the view is that "This
>was good tea" refers to the last sip, thus factually being past, or to
>the present situation (which is likely), Norwegian informants would
>unanimously say that "var" (was) is past tense. The intrinsic meaning of
>the word has notchanged, only its use.
>
>3) Dette var god te.  (This was good tea.)

This is as good an example as any of the problems of talking
about uncancelable intrinsic meaning or anything similar. Let's
assume that this is a common English expression. When I looked up
``was'' in my little dictionary it said it was the past tense of
be. It said a bit more than that but nothing useful for our purposes.
So say I write to the good people at the dictionary company and
point out to them that ``was'' is used as a present tense in the
common expression above and suggest they add a new meaning to their
dictionary. I doubt they would be sympathetic to making the addition.
I expect they would give me the same sort of explanation which Rolf
has just given, that it is some type of special usage.
So there is a sense in which the ``past tenseness'' of ``was'' has
been canceled in this context. But it hasn't canceled it to the
extent that it will convince the keepers of the dictionary.

But then the question arises -- what use is a dictionary?
It is obvious that dictionaries, and also grammar books, capture
a great deal of useful information about a language. But languages
are notoriously flexible and you don't have to torture words very
hard to create self contradictory sentences and reversals of meaning.
For example ``Even one of their own prophets has said, "Cretans are always
liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons."'' No one, except philosophers, gets
stuck in an infinite loop trying to figure whether all Cretans are
liars. Everyone recognises that it is hyperbole.

So in a rather ironic twist I think that ``uncancelable'' is
being used in just such a non-standard way so that those who
are arguing against uncancelability aren't allowing the word
to take on a new meaning. :-)

Having watched the debate for the ten years or so that it has been
going on I've almost always found the counter-examples to be highly
contrived or of the special usage type. Lets take an example:-

Q: Are you going to the Lantern Festival tomorrow night?
A: I was going tomorrow, but something has come up.

Is the ``was'' really a future reference? I don't think so. We
all know what was meant. A is saying ``In the past it had been
my intension to go to the Lantern Festival tomorrow night but
I will be prevented from attending by new circumstances.''
By our common experience with English we don't find this
either exceptional or unintelligable, instead we fill in the
gaps and it makes perfectly good sense. I don't need to write
to the dictionary people get them to add a new meaning to
their entry for ``was''.

At moment there seems to be no common ground or common terminology
for talking about this.

Bill Rea, ICT Services, University of Canterbury \_
E-Mail bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz                </   New
Phone 64-3-364-2331, Fax  64-3-364-2332        /)  Zealand
Unix Systems Administrator                    (/'