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  • From: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] b-hebrew Uncancellable meaning and Hebrew verbs
  • Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:06:02 +1000


Hi Rolf,

I note two things: a) that you persist with a discovery of so-called uncancellable meaning despite the fact that this as a valid linguistic concept that is appropriate across the board has yet to be established; and b) that you simply avoid what is in reality the complicated issue of frequency in relation to determining whether a particular linguistic instance is marginal or non-marginal and prototypical or non-prototypical.

Regards,
David Kummerow.


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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