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  • From: Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Cc: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Denominative vs Deverbal
  • Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:40:49 -0500

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.




  • Re: [b-hebrew] Denominative vs Deverbal, Peter Bekins, 02/13/2009

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