Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Sure moving from form to function is the kind of thing that is needed in
order to do the work of a translator. But the question is how many functions
align to the forms? It is clearly not a 1 to 1 mapping but what tools can we
use to establish how many functions there are, what their qualities are and
which indicators identify them?

James Christian

2010/1/31 Joseph Justiss <jljustiss AT msn.com>

>
> It is time for me to make some more comments for clarification.
>
>
>
> 1. In my original post Sailhamer and Scneider do not use the word "tense"
> to refer to verbal forms with built in time reference. They just use it
> because of convenience to refer to the various verbal forms encountered in
> BH's morphology.
>
>
>
> 2. Sailhamer would agree that the wayyiqtol does not have past reference.
> Their contention is that when a BH author wants to construct a narrative and
> signal to his reader that he is refering to events which are no longer
> present within the domain of the author-reader context he uses the wayyiqtol
> verb form/"tense" to generate a narrative text. When that same author wants
> to provide information that is background to the current narrative, or wants
> to refer back to an event on a previous wayyiqtol chain he uses qatal verbal
> forms.
>
>
>
> This system is an attempt to explain the generation of Hebrew narrative
> texts moving from form to function. I think it is worthy of serious
> consideration because of its ability to explain texts and because after
> centuries of studies the best and brightest minds in the field of Hebrew
> grammar still lack serious consensus as to the function of the verbal forms.
> Perhaps this is not in spite of our methodology, but precisely because of
> our methodology. Let's look for a better more promising methodology. I think
> it will come from "form to function" approaches and text-linguistics which
> limits itself to text immanent data and goes beyond sentence level analysis.
>
>
>
> Joseph Justiss
>
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