Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear  list-members,

As you have seen, there has been an exchange between David Kummerow 
and me. He has misrepresented me on several issues - I will return to 
that when I comment his comments on the dissertation.



> What this means is that one's linguistic view informs how the data is
> treated. For Rolf, he must search for extremely isolated contexts to
> define meaning -- in his terms, about a couple of hundred examples of
> wayyiqtol out of about 14,000. However, in my view, such an approach
> runs at odds with the entrenchment of meaning established by frequency
> as per the linguistic evidence presented in functional and typological
> studies.



Here I will just say that the comments above are so silly that I am 
completely breathless.
No linguist will deny that there is a difference between past 
reference and past tense. The English participle has present 
reference in 1), past reference in 2), and future reference in 3). 
But the past reference in 2) does not indicate that the participle 
expresses past tense; it is not a tense.


1) Right now Rita is walking.

2) Yesterday Rita was walking.

3) Tomorrow Rita will be walking.



When we have a corpus of 14,000 verb forms with a similar morphology, 
and 93.1% have past reference and 6,9% have non-past reference, in 
order to find out whether these forms represent tense or aspect or 
whatever, it is obvious for a linguist that we must look for the 
examples that are transparent, and where we can see the inner 
constituency. Such an approach is not the same as overlooking the 
other forms, but they simply do not tell us much, because the 
situations are not transparent. It is a normal linguistic procedure 
to look for meaning where it is found, whether there are many or few 
cases that can be analyzed.

Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of oslo

>