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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: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 08:44:08 +0200

Dear James,

See my comments below.




In order to find examples where the perfective aspect portrays
actions that are ongoing, and where the end is not reached, you can
only use the perfect participle - he has stood.


I am sorry but I am not following your reasoning. Please consider a) and b). We agree that from 8 until 12 the state of standing held as in (a), and from 8 until 12 the action of working continued,
as in (b). But remember that the aspects are not concerned with what actually happened, but they make visible *a part* of what actually happened. How long E lasted, and whether the person also "stood" after 12 o´clock is irrelevant. The point is that R intersects E at the coda (at 12 o`clock). Therefore, c) and d) are odd and ungrammatical.

a) From 8 o´clock this morning until 12 he has stood on his feet.

b) From 8 o´clock this morning until 12 he has worked.

c) While he from 8 o´clock this morning until 12 has stood on his feet, his daughter was born.

d) While he from 8 o´clock this morning until 12 has worked, his daughter was born.





Also consider the following:

1) I have gone for a long time (doesn't make sense)
2) I have been gone for a long time (now makes sense)
3) I have known this for a long time (unlike sentence 1 this makes sense)

Where is the intersection of E by R in 3)?

In 3 I would understand both the imperfect and the perfect aspect being made visible as you analysed the 'He has been ... ' phrase above. That is to say that two features are revealed

a) The length of time the thing has been known (perfective sense)
b) The ongoing knowledge (imperfective sense)

Consider also the following:

4) I have felt this way for a long time
5) I have had this email account for almost a year

These emails seem to indicate that certain verbs are used in the present perfect construction but with a present progressive sense. The semantics of the verb overrides the default sense of the construction.

That the person had a particular feeling for a long time, (and the state of feeling held for a long time), portrays a factual situation. But it has nothing to do with the aspect, i.e., where R intersects E. You must always distinguish between the event or state and what the aspect makes visible of the event or state. My view is that e) odd and ungrammatical while f) is a normal English clause.

e) While I have felt this way for a long time, I started to consider whether my feelings where rooted in reality.

f) While I was feeling this way, I started to consider whether my feeling were rooted in reality.


Conversely, consider:

6) I have been having this email account for almost a year
7) He has been being in the corner for a long time

In fact, as the above examples show, when we attempt to use the present progressive construction with these verbs the sentence sounds odd although it is possible for us to extract the intended sense.

I dare say that a similar phenomenon may have happened in BH. That is to say that the semantics of individual verbs could override the semantics of the verb form. However, we simply do not have the data required to fully test this.

Clauses 6) and 7) show that by combining the two aspects in English, and thus getting present perfect progressive clauses, you can signal ongoing situations by the use of "has". But still you have not cancelled the uniform interpretation of the combination of have + perfect participle. To do that you must give examples of these two forms where R intersects E at the nucleus.

------


When we start to study a dead language such as BH, we do not know what the language is like and we do not know exactly what we will find. But we need a model, on the basis of which we can study the language. When I started to study the Hebrew verb, my model built on two basic assumptions, 1) there is nothing special with BH compared to other languages. So it can be studied in the same way as other languages, and 2) a difference in form suggests a difference in meaning. I still think that these two assumptions are built on a solid ground.

Let us leave the infinite form alone at the moment. When I looked at the unpointed texts of the DSS, I saw only two fundamental verbs forms, the suffix forms (some prefixed with WAW), and the prefix forms (some prefixed with WAW). My first task was to find out whether there was a semantic difference between the forms with prefixed WAW and those without prefixed WAW. On the basis of a study of the functions, temporal references, and the occurrences of the different forms, my conclusion was that there was no difference, and BH has only two finite verb forms (conjugtions) . The next step was to look for the meaning of the two BH conjugations, and how could that be done? I will use two English examples.

Suppose that English was the dead language we studied; We knew its vocabulary but we were working to find the meaning of the verbal system, and we were to consider g) and h). From the vocabulary we see that there is a reach-event in connection with a peak. The clauses are similar except some characteristics of the verbs- "was ... ing" versus "has ... ed". There is nothing in the two clauses that can tell us where R intersects E, so what should we do? We should look for examples of similar verb forms in our corpus, where the intersection of R and E is visible, and see if these can be given a uniform interpretation. I have found such a uniform interpretation of was + present participle and has + perfect participle, and therefore I think I have a good reason to extrapolate these interpretations and conclude that g) signals that the end was not reached at C, while the end was reached in h).

g) She was reaching the peak.

h) She has reached the peak.

Then what about the theoretical setting for the analysis above? Because I know that semantic meaning does exist (e.g., the telicity of phrasal verbs), I refuse to accept David Kummerows categorical dictum that uncancellable meaning cannot be found because it does not exist. This is in my view linguistic anarchy. When I started my study I did not know whether uncancellable meaning existed in the BH conjugations, but I studied the systems in order to see if uniform interpretations were possible. Then to your concern, the possibility that "the semantics of individual verbs could override the semantics of the verb form". This concern has some relations to DK's standpoint, because it focuses on the possibility that a uniform interpretation can be cancelled by counterexamples. Because it is not a categorical standpoint, it deserves to be considered. How? By looking for examples in the BH text. But we should be careful in our interpretation of the BH examples. So far, you have given several examples of a combination of the imperfective and perfective aspect, but these examples do not blot out the semantics of English perfect, that R intersects E. at the coda. (BTW The two aspects cannot be combined in BH, so that languge is less flexible.) My point, therefore, is that we should not stop drawing conclusions regarding the Hebrew verbs because of the *possibility* that we will find something that cancels our conclusions. And we should not believe that our conclusions are weak, because there is the *possibility* that they can be canceled. Until it is demonstrated that our uniform interpretations do not hold, we should stick to them.




James Christian




Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo




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