Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

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