Biblical Hebrew Forum

[fred burlingame <tensorpath AT gmail.com>]

Hello Bryant:

That appears to be the generally accepted view:

1. qtl & wayqtl forms instruct the past tense; and

2. yqtl and weqtl encode the future tense.

And indeed your examples so confirm.

But, this author claims numerous exceptions to the rule.

"The four Hebrew conjugations can be distinguished on the basis of
morphology and accent, but this does not prove they are semantically
distinct. According to Furuli, the statistics indicate that the four forms
are not semantically fixed because there is no uniform temporal distribution
for any of them. Each can function in reference to the past, present, and
future, challenging the idea that tense is grammaticalized in classical
Hebrew. For example, by Furuli’s count, 6.9 percent of *wayyiqtol*s have
nonpast reference, and 5.9 percent of *weqatal*s have past reference.
Similarly, 2,505 (18 percent) of *qatal*s have present reference, and 965
(6.9 percent) have future reference.


http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/5564_5860.pdf

and therein lies the rub ....

regards,

fred burlingame



On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 12:21 PM, Bryant J. Williams III <
bjwvmw AT com-pair.net> wrote:

> Dear List,
>
> Colleague of mine sent the article below to me from a doctoral classmate of
> his
> when he was at Brandeis.
>
> "Tense and Aspect of Hebrew Verbs in 2 Samuel 7: 8-16—from the Point of
> View of
> Discourse Grammar"— by David Toshio Tsumura, Tokyo, in Vetus Testamentum 60
> (2010) 641-654.
>
> "This article is a revised version of my paper read at the Hebrew Language
> session of the XVth
> World Congress of Jewish Studies at Jerusalem on Aug. 6, 2009. I have
> received
> helpful and
> encouraging comments from scholars such as E. L. Greenstein, G. A.
> Rendsburg,
> Ch. Cohen,
> T. Zewi, F. Polak, T. Notarius and J. N. Ford." (Footnote 1)
>
> The article is 14 pages and here is the abstract:
> "In Nathan’s second prophetic speech (2 Sam. 7:8-16), at first the flow of
> narrative discourse is
> carried on by the sequence of the verbal forms qtl—wayqtl—wayqtl (vs.
> 8b-9a)
> but, in v. 9b, the
> flow is changed, if not stopped, by the sequence w-qtl . . . w-qtl . . .
> See 1
> Sam 17:38, 2 Sam 12:16. Vs. 9b-11a is what Longacre calls a “how-it
> was-done”
> procedural discourse and serves structurally as a transition from the
> Lord’s
> past dealings with David in vs. 8b-9a to his future dealings with David in
> vs.
> 12-16. Thus, vs. 8b-9a conveys a past fact, and how it was done is
> explained
> concretely by the “procedural” discourse in vs. 9b-11a. Such a
> narrative-procedural discourse with the sequence of verbal forms wayqtl. .
> .
> w-qtl can also be seen in 1 Sam 1:4, 7:15-16, 2 Sam 13:18, Job 1:5."
>
> Rev. Bryant J. Williams III
>
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