Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Rolf:

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 5:48 AM, Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no> wrote:

>
> …. A very fine approach,
> therefore would be to use parameters that are universal, and on this
> basis study the Hebrew verbal system without any preconceived
> conditions. A set of such universal parameters do exist, namely,
> event time, reference time, and the deictic center. Tense
> (grammaticalization of location in time) is the relationship between
> the deictic center and reference time, and aspect is the relationship
> between event time and reference time. Thus, tense represents deictic
> time, and aspect represents non-deictic time. A study of any verbal
> system by the help of these parameters may give good results. and the
> advantage is that we need not use any preconceived definitions.
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rolf Furuli
> University of Oslo
>
> Are these universal parameters for grammaticalization?

Just from reading the text, I noticed that tense is derived from the
contexts, not the grammatical forms. But I have noticed that when I try to
read aspect into the grammatical forms, that doesn’t seem to fit either.
This then raises the question, is there a time element at all in Biblical
Hebrew verbal grammatical forms?

No, I haven’t read Michel. Has he, like almost everyone else today, has been
so conditioned by his upbringing in modern verbal systems that have time
grammaticalizations that he read back into Hebrew what was not there? How do
we differentiate between what is contextually indicated, from verbal form
indications? In other words, how do we step out of our frame of reference to
understand theirs?

Karl W. Randolph.