Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net>]

David,

I have read Cook's dissertation and various other articles on the  
verbal system, but I haven't had time yet to get into the nitty  
gritty. Thank you for the other reference.

Peter Bekins


On Feb 13, 2009, at 1:20 PM, b-hebrew-request AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> 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.