Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Hi Peter,

The issue is a bit more complex than what Cohen knew at the time. The 
following book is invaluable reading for the typological background for 
predication in general:

Stassen, Leon. 1997. Intransitive Predication. Oxford Studies in 
Typology and Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon.

Also check out his essays in World Atlas of Language Structures.

The movement of the verbal system from aspect to tense has the effect of 
causing property predication to be semantically less compatible with a 
verbal encoding strategy than a nominal encoding strategy (see John 
Cook's dissertation, the first Hebraist to note this to the best of my 
knowledge). As such, we find in BH a closed set of stative verbs, but an 
open class of adjectives taking nominal encoding (note that "adjectives" 
in terms of formal morphology are difficult to isolate from "nouns", and 
may generally only be done on semantic criteria and/or distributional 
criteria), ie a null object predication strategy (juxtaposition). This 
transition has a major effect on both the extent of verbal encoding, as 
well as that of nominal encoding. Aligned with this then seems to be the 
rise of HYH to make tense distinctions when necessary, as Cohen has 
correctly noted (so also Bartelmus etc.).

I'm familiar with these issues since I'm writing the chapter of my 
dissertation at the moment on object predication in Tiberian Hebrew, 
primarily addressing the issue of the question whether the independent 
third-person pronouns may have a nonverbal copula function.

Regards,
David Kummerow.


> Fred and David,
>
> I just wanted to let you know that I am not ignoring this thread, but 
> I've been quite busy the last couple of days and I really don't have 
> anything substantial to add. I agree that there seems to be a bias 
> towards denominativization against deverbalization, and it may indeed 
> stem from the fact that nouns are somehow viewed as more basic than verbs.
>
> I just read Cohen's "La phrase nominale et l'evolution du system verbal 
> en Semitique" in which he argues that the versatility of the verbless 
> clause in Semitic drives a cycle of change in Semitic verbal systems by 
> introducing new verbal forms built on the syntax of nominal predicates, 
> an idea with which I substantially agree. However, this is an issue of 
> grammaticalization where a lexical form acquires a grammatical function. 
> The issue of denominativization vs deverbalization is mostly within the 
> realm of lexicon and word formation.
>
> I would guess that there would be a group of words whose meaning is more 
> naturally nominal and a group whose meaning is more naturally verbal so 
> that it would be easy to guess which one came first, but most words 
> probably fall somewhere in between. I would be interested if anyone 
> knows of any research into the topic.
>
> Peter Bekins