Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] cancellable dynamicity

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] cancellable dynamicity
  • Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 10:38:48 +0200


Dear Karl,

I have not continued to participate in this thread because I think it is a waste of time to discuss something that is settled. You have made many good observations in this thread, and of course, to discuss whether a particular word has an uncancellable property has a little more merit. But again, I prefer to discuss more important matters.

I will illustrate my answer regarding the Hebrew participle with an observation regarding the English aspectual system, where I take the participle as the imperfective and perfect as the perfective aspect. In verbs marked for dynamicity, durativity, or telicity, the uncancellable factor is a characteristic or property of the verb. Regarding English aspects the uncancellable factor is a relationship. Broman Olsen (1997:59) says:

"situations with marked lexical aspect features have a uniform interpretation in each grammatical aspect form (imperfective and perfective), whereas the interpretation of situations unmarked for a given feature vary."

We note that "the uniform interpretations" relate to situations where the the participle and the perfect are used as predicates. The "uniform interpretation" of the participle does not refer to the participle per se but to its use as a predicate in a clause. So, participles used as adjectives are no counterexamples of the uniform interpretation, because they have no aspectual properties. And the same is true in Hebrew and other Semitic languages. The same root can be used as a verb, a substantive, an adjective, and sometimes even as a preposition. So only when the Hebrew participle functions as a verb, we can speak of uncancellable properties. A participle used as an adjective or as a substantive is something different.

Then back to uncancellable relationships and the English aspects. I have already given one example of a participle used to signal a completed action, But it was used as a counterfactual effect in a poetic context. Broman Olsen claims that each of the English aspects has a uniform interpretation. In order to falsify that claim, one has to find normal situations where the participle and the perfect have exactly the same interpretation, i.e., where the participle signals completed action and the perfect signals uncompleted action. If such situations cannot be found, we have before our eyes an uncancellable grammatical relationship.


Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo







Yitzhak:

The question is, does Rolf see verbal participles as different from
nominative participles?

Right now I'm inclined to say that they are different, and that the
rules of uncancelability do not apply to both equally. If Rolf says
that they are equal, then we'll have some fun.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Yitzhak Sapir<yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 5:02 AM, K Randolph wrote:

Right now I'm willing to live with a certain amount of fuzziness in
understanding, but if you insist that I choose one side or the other,
I would say that in Biblical Hebrew a participle = noun, hence not to
be treated as a verb.

I am not insisting that you choose one side or the other. I said that
you should treat them consistently -- not choosing one side or the
other in different cases based on your perception of grammar. My
preference is to view them all as "fuzzy" between both a noun and
a verb. Rolf was very explicit in his claims and stated that both
infinitives and participles -- without exception -- are not cancellable,
so you'd seem to be at odds with his view. Again, cancellable here
(based on Olsen) means that context cannot cause a verb to lose
its inherent meaning (such as dynamicity). I get the feeling you've
got a different view of cancellability.

Yitzhak Sapir
_______________________________________________
b-hebrew mailing list
b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page