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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] b-hebrew Uncancellable meaning and Hebrew verbs
  • Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:19:36 +0200

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







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