Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear Nir,

In the book "The Development of English Aspectual Systems," L. J: 
Brinton, 1988, p. 5, we find about 20 different descriptions and 
definitions of aspect.  You reject aspect as a part of the verbal 
system of Classical Hebrew. So my question is: What have you 
rejected? What is your definition of the perfective and imperfective 
aspect respectively?



Best regards,

Rolf Furuli



> dear rolf, paul, fred, arnaud,
>
> i agree with arnaud. the idea of aspect is most interesting. however, looking
> at any
> chapter of the tanakh, it shows NO correlation WHATEVER with the distribution
> of the
> two forms, qatal and wayiqtol,
>
>                       WITHIN A GIVEN SENTENCE!!!
>
> (not in the entire text). there must be a much simpler technical explanation
> here.
> here it comes, fred!
>
> ----------------
>
> let us just consider sentences which are not compound, with time, tense,
> aspect all being equal,
> namely, past. also, with just two actions, clearly in the past. we have
> thousands of such
> sentences in the torah. maybe pere's chapter 2sam 17 can be used here.
>
> FACT 1: each half of the sentence may start with a verb or non-verb.
>
> FACT 2: each sentence (whenever possible) starts with a w-. this is the
> standasrd past narrative
> form of BH. let us restrict our attention to such sentences.
>
> COROLLARY 3: the verb is wayqtol if it comes first (following the w-), qatal
> otherwise (not following w-).
>
> HYPOTHESIS 4: each of the forms (qatal, yqtol) cannot occur twice in the same
> sentence. (this is what i
> described as poetic style).
>
>    hypothesis 4 works well in practice, although it should be ammended in some
> cases. one case is analyzed below.
>
> COROLLARY 5: each sentence of the type described above should be of one of the
> following two forms:
>
> CASE 1) first half starts with a verb, second half .... not.
>         first verb is wyqtol, second verb is qatal (or other forms such as
> infinitive).
>
> CASE 2) first half does not start with a verb, second half .....yes.
>         first verb is qatal, second is wayqtol.
>
> so we see that in most cases the SVO and VSO order of the second half will be
> dependent, via inversion,
> on the first half. some cases where hypothesis 4 is violated may be attributed
> to difficulties in
> maintaining this inversion in the narrative.
>
> the only enigma left is to understand how the word order of the first half is
> chosen. this issue
> mixes both grammar and context, and would be beyond my capacity to 
> describe here.
>
> i believe that this simple mechanical explanation fits the text much better
> than the aspect
> assumption, in the sense i specified, i.e. WITHIN EACH ISOLATED, SIMPLE
> SENTENCE. clearly, in more
> complicated sentences, where aspect, tense and time may diverge, the more
> complicated grammatical
> theories may be helpful.
>
> nir cohen
>
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