Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud AT wanadoo.fr>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 9:50 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] fred on 2 tenses at the same sentence


> Dear Paul,
>
> I remember that you and I  had several interesting discussions in the 90s, 
> both on b-greek and on b-hebrew. I appreciate that you quoted my words, 
> and I would like to elucidate the issue.
>
> Mari Broman Olsen wrote a dissertation regarding the Greek and English 
> verbs. The great advantage of her work is that she scrupulously 
> distinguished between semantic meaning (uncencellable meaning which is an 
> intrinsic part for the verb form) and conversational pragmatic implicature 
> (cancellable meaning based on the context).
***
ok
that's interesting
but obviously there's one parameter lacking here: the semantics created by 
linguistic verbal tools.
The issue is not just about intrinsic semantics and context.
A.
***


In order to try to find the meaning of the Hebrew
> conjugations, one has to study their use. However, there are several 
> pitfalls. For example, 13,539 (93.1%) WAYYIQTOLs in the Tanakh have past 
> reference and 997 (6.9%) have non-past reference. Which conclusion can we 
> draw from these numbers? Can we conclude that the WAYYIQTOL form has an 
> intrinsic past tense? Absolutely not, because of the 6.9% with non-past 
> reference that occur in normal contexts and clauses.
***
> From that I would nevertheless conclude that WA-YYIQTOL has something to do 
with completed action.
Completed action refers to past most of time, but it can also refer to 
future or even present.

Somebody (has) walked here: is a completed action observable in the present.

It can also be observed that some Arabic verbs like waSala to come "lose" 
their w- in Present tense,
which confirms the huge tropism of these wa- forms with past.

It would be interesting to see which verbs cannot be in the WA-YYIQTOL 
because of their intrinsic meaning.
They probably have durative-stative meanings which conflict with the idea of 
a completed process. What about "to suffer" for example, typically a verb 
that does not have a target or purpose?
Another non durative word is "to be born", typically a completed action 
verb: can this word be used otherwise than in the Wa-YYiQTol?
A.
***


> But how can we explain the great number with past reference? To approach 
> this question in a scholarly way, on has to make a scrupulous distinction 
> between semantics (intrinsic meaning) and pragmatics (meaning taken from 
> the context). Except for may own doctoral dissertation, I am not aware of 
> a single study of Hebrew verbs that systematically has distinguished 
> between semantics and pragmatics!
>
> The approach to WAYYIQTOL can be like this: Most of the 93.1% of 
> WAYYIQTOLs with past reference occur in narrative contexts. Narratives in 
> any language have strings of verbs with past reference connected with the 
> conjunction "and." Thus, the narrative itself has per definition past 
> reference. The verb forms used to express narrative may or may not have an 
> intrinsic past tense. For example, in Phoenician the narrative verb form 
> is the infinitive absolute, and no one has claimed that this form has an 
> intrinsic past tense. Regarding WAYYIQTOL we must ask: Is the  WAY(Y) 
> element the typical narrative conjunction that is prefixed to a YIQTOL 
> form, so the past reference is a function of the narrative and not an 
> intrinsic property of the verb? Or,  has the WAYYIQTOL an intrinsic past 
> tense? The statistics above shows that WAYYIQTOL is not a past tense.
>
> But if WAYYIQTOL is not a tense, what is it then? And what do YIQTOL, 
> WEYIQTOL, QATAL, and WEQATAL represent? To answer these questions in a 
> thorough way, one has to use the right parameters, and apply them to all 
> the verbs of the Tanakh. There are only three parameters that are needed, 
> 1) event time (ET), reference time (RT) and the deictic center (C). What 
> are the nature of these properties?  ET is the time from the beginning of 
> an event to its end. When we communicate, we make visible a part of ET or 
> the whole ET; the area that is made visible is RT.  We can say that RT 
> intersects ET, and in 1) RT intersects ET at the nucleus, after the 
> beginning and before the end; in 2) RT intersects ET at the end.
>
> 1) Ann was walking in the garden.
>
> 2) Ann has arrived.
***
I prefer:

Ann walked the dog one hour ago.
Completed action (in the past)

Ann was walking the dog one hour ago.
Incompleted action (in the past).

This pair clearly shows that verbal "tenses", even in a tense-based language 
like English, generate their own additional aspectual features independently 
of context and lexical material.
The only difference between this pair is Preterit, which expresses 
completion, versus Progressive Past, which expresses incompletion.

I'm afraid I completely disagree with your approach.

Arnaud Fournet
***


> The deictic center (C) is the vantage point from which an event is viewed; 
> mostly C is speech time, but it can also be future or past.
>
> The concept tense (=grammaticalization of location tin time) is a function 
> of RT and C. Past tense :RT comes before C,; future tense: RT comes after 
> C: present "tense": RT coincides with C.  Tense represents deictic time, 
> that is, tense is always seen in relation to a deictic center, a vantage 
> point.
>
> Aspect is the function of ET and RT, and it represents non-deictic time, 
> because the time is not seen in relation to a vantage point.
>
> Broman Olsen used these parameters, and she showed that in English there 
> are two aspects with uniform meaning: the imperfective aspect= the present 
> participle; the perfective aspect= perfect. (simple past is not an aspect 
> but only a tense.)  Broman Olsen's work with English is excellent, but she 
> erred when she assumed that aspects are similar in all aspectual 
> languages.
>
> The three parameters, ET, RT, and C can be used to analyze all languages 
> to find whether they have tenses and aspects. But to find out whether the 
> Hebrew conjugations are aspects and the similarities and differences 
> between Hebrew and English aspects, we need to look at the inner 
> constituency of ET and RT and their function. Aspects represent the 
> author's viewpoint or focus, and it possible to see different qualities in 
> this focus. The angle of focus (the area of ET that is intersected by RT) 
> can also be analyzed. In English, there are only two angles (nucleus-end) 
> but in Hebrew there are many. The breadth of the focus can also be 
> analyzed. Because there are two aspects, and three different kinds of 
> focus, Hebrew and English aspects can be compared in six different ways. 
> The result is that three are similar, and three are different. Because the 
> most important parameter, the angle of focus, is different, the aspects of 
> English and Hebrew are completely different.
>
> The task of the student, therefore, is to study different Hebrew texts, 
> find the deictic center (C) of each verb, and see how and where reference 
> time (RT) intersects event time (ET). I propose a challenge: Apply this to 
> Proverbs 31:10-31, and explain why so many different verb forms are used 
> in the same way with the same temporal reference.
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rolf Furuli