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  • From: Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] no to aspect
  • Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 08:27:03 +0100

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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