Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Stephen Shead <srshead+bh AT gmail.com>]

Dear Rolf,

You haven't understood my question. I know you don't believe WAYYIQTOL is
ever past tense, and I believe I understand the terms we are working with
here. I'll try to rephrase both my question(s) and my example.

Actually, I'll start with the example. Obviously, the English (so-called)
past indicative form (*went / thought / swam / walked*) is usually a tense
(past grammaticalization of location in time), so a name like "simple past"
or "past indicative" fits. But what I am trying to show is that in some
cases, this form is NOT a tense, but rather a mood (subjunctive). The
following conversation may illustrate this better:

A: I'm going to drive to work.
B: If you *walked*, you would be helping the environment.

For "walked", the deictic centre is the present moment, and the reference
time is future - though strictly speaking, it's a future moment in one of
several possible "worlds" or mental spaces (one which seems not very
likely).

Anyway, the point is that the form which grammaticalizes "past" in the
majority of constructions/contexts does NOT do so in this type of
construction (and others): in this construction it is a subjunctive verb,
often with future reference. However, this more rare modal use does not
automatically disprove that, most of the time, the form is indeed a past
tense.

Hence my conclusions: (1) the presence or absence of tense (grammaticalized
time) is not inextricably tied to a particular verb form; that is, one form
can have two mutually exclusive TAM functions, and (2) the "semantic value"
of a verb form must take into account wider contextual considerations (or
better, wider constructional considerations).

My question, then, relates to the assumptions in your methodology. Do you
assume, in your analysis, that a given verbal *form* (in this case,
WAYYIQTOL) must always have the same core TAM *function/meaning*? Or do you
consider the possibility that its "meaning" could be different in different
grammatical contexts, just like the *-ed* form in English? For instance,
Waltke and O'Connor's analysis of YIQTOL has it as sometimes imperfective
and sometimes modal.

Actually, I'd like to broaden the question and open it to anybody, because
even if I'm raising a valid methodological point, it may have no practical
relevance here. Is there any value in posing this question with respect to
WAYYIQTOL? Is anyone aware of studies which have considered the possibility?
And if the answer is "no value", I humbly bow out.

Best regards,
Stephen Shead
Centro de Estudios Pastorales
Santiago, Chile