Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Rolf" <rolf.furuli AT sf-nett.no>]

Dear Frank,

I will read your book, and you should read my dissertation, because it is 
good for a lecturer to be aware of the different scholarly approaches to the 
Hebrew verbal system that exists. Many list members do not read German, so I 
will make some comments before I have read your book. Now I understand a 
little more of your model, but not all of it. It reminds me somewhat of the 
"Textlinguistik" of Harald Weinrich (Tempus: Besprochende und Erzälte Welt 
(1964), but there are differences as well. It also reminds me of the 
discourse linguistics of different other auhors. Both of these systems are 
unassailable (admitted by Weinrich); there are no controls, because the focus 
is on chunks of texts and not on words or word forms.

You have indirectly answered my question regarding aspect, that the 
conjugations are not aspectual, but that aspect is connected with one or more 
clauses. But you have not defined "tense."

You say:
"In this text it is very hard to believe  that the finite verbal form 
וַיָּבֵא֙ is not tense."

RF: If you expect the readers to understand what you write, in this case you 
must define "tense." I agree that the reference is past, and why can we say 
that? Because 2:19 is a part of a piece of narrative. And the verbs that 
carry the action forward in narratives have by definition past reference. But 
these verbs need not have past tense or have the perfective aspect; In 
Phoenician, infinitive absolutes are used as narrative verbs, and they 
neither are tenses nor aspects. I analyze the verse in the following way: The 
setting is the creation of animals and birds, bringing them to Adam, and the 
naming of these. All this must have taken some time, as you observe.

My translation of 2:19 is as follows: "YHWH God continued to form (WAYYIQTOL, 
Qal) from the ground every animal and every flying creature of the heavens; 
and he continued to bring (WAYYIQTOL Hifil) them to the man to see 
(infinitive copnstruct) what he would call (YIQTOL, Qal) each one. And 
whatever the man called (YIQTOL, Qal) it, each living soul, that was its 
name."

In the first WAYYIQTOL, reference time (RT) intersects event time (ET) in the 
middle; a part of ET whith continuing or iterative action is made visible. 
Exactly the same intersection is seen in the second WAYYIQTOL.  The first 
YIQTOL is modal, and therefore does not have any intersection. The second 
YIQTOL has a singular subject and object and the verb is semelfactive. So, RT 
intersects ET after its end, which means that it has a resultative force; a 
part of the resultant state is visible. The verse contains 4 imperfective 
verbs, three having past reference (but not past tense), and one i modal.

The imperfective force of the WAYYIQTOL FORM is clearly seen in 2:21 where 
one WAYYIQTOL intersects another WAYYIQTOL: "Then YHWH God caused a deep 
sleep to fall (WAYYIQTOL) upon the man. And while he was sleeping 
(WAYYIQTOL), he took (WAYYIQTOL) one of his ribs, and closed up (WAYYIQTOL) 
the flesh over its place."

The third WAYYIQTOL expresses a state "while he was sleeping" and this state 
is intersected by the next  WAYYIQTOL "he took one of the man's ribs."  A 
parallel clause is: While John was reading the paper, Kate entered the room." 
Such a sentence is used by Comrie and others to demonstrate that the English 
participle FORM is imperfective.

I do not understand how we can know the nuances of a dead language if its 
conjugations cannot be semantically distinguished. This is illustrated by 1), 
2) and 3) below.

1) Jill reached the peak.

2) Jill had reached the  peak.

3) Jill was reaching the peak.

If English was a dead language that we tried to understand, and we did not 
which verb FORMS expressed aspect and which tense, we could neither 
distinguish the time reference of the three clauses, neither their nuances. 
If there was a context, we could possibly know whether the reference was past 
or future; but not if a clause lacked a temporal context. (This is the case 
in many poetic texts in the Tanakh). If semantic meaning was expressed by the 
verb form, each single sentence could be understood: The verb of 1) is simple 
past and therefore is a tense; the verb of 2) is pre-past, and is a 
combination of past tense and the perfective aspect. The verb of 3) is a 
participle, and because we know the the verb FORM participle is imperfective, 
and the verb is semelfactive, the meaning is that Jill was on the point of 
reaching the peak, but had not yet reached it. So, RT intersects ET 
immediately before the reaching event. Even if we had a context, it would 
have been impossible to know the nuances of 3) if we did not know that the 
participle had a particular semantic meaning, that it was imperfective.



Best regards,


Rolf Furuli
Stavern
Norway




Lørdag 8. Desember 2012 12:42 CET skrev "Dr. Frank Matheus" <post AT matheus.de>:

> Dear Rolf & Karl & all,
>
>
>
> quote Karl: I’m not a great scholar in linguistics, but this doesn’t sound 
> like anything that I learned in class, nor read up on line such as at  
> <http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/> 
> http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/ . In those 
> sources, aspect has specific references to time, and tense a different set 
> of references to time. I’m having trouble understanding what you are saying.
>
>
>
> FM: The definition of SIL is not bad; they define aspect as follows: “ 
> Aspect is a grammatical category associated with  
> <http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAVerbLinguistics.htm>
>  verbs that expresses a temporal view of the event or state expressed by 
> the verb.”
>
>
>
> Note that this definition says that the verb expresses a state or an event 
> and that the aspect is associated with the verb. But it doesn’t say that 
> the verbal form expresses the aspect, or refers to a specific time. I just 
> would complement the definition: Aspects regulate the temporal relations 
> within texts; they are independent from speaker and recipient (and, Rolf, 
> therefore do not have communicational functions) – whereas tenses regulate 
> the triangle of speaker-text-recipient (they are communicational).
>
>
>
> To understand the problem better, we can refer back to the British 
> philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (yes, that’s his name), a 
> colleague of Bertrand Russell, who wrote a famous article in which he 
> wanted to prove that time does not exist. He might have failed in this 
> regard, but he has elaborated a very prudential system to describe time, 
> which is widely acknowledged. He assumes three series. In the A-series we 
> meet the well-known time-line, from the dark foretime to a bright future. 
> As my present tense is different from the present tense of, say, Ronald 
> Reagan or of my present tense yesterday, we always have to pinpoint 
> “moments” (as McT calls them) on the time line to make clear of what time 
> we are talking. That means, the flow of time is connected to the viewer.  
> The B-series comprises of events, processes, and situations. We can compare 
> them and say that event E is earlier than event F and that F is later than 
> D. These relations never change, they have always been and will ever be 
> without any alteration. When I say that Ronald Reagan died before my 
> daughter was born, this temporal relation will always be the same till the 
> end of days. The relations of the events are totally independent of the 
> viewer: I just can take note of them. In the C-series then we find simple 
> rows which are not time-related, e.g. the numbers 1 to 10. They can be 
> reversed, but not changed (8 and 9 cannot switch places). The Unreality of 
> Time. In: Mind. A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17,1908, pp 
> 457-474.
>
>
>
> This view can easily be “grammaticalized”. Our awareness of time is 
> reflected in our languages. So language expresses our experience with time. 
> In real life, ergo in texts, the A- and B-series (occasionally the C-series 
> too) mingle. What I want to make clear is that though aspects and tenses 
> are likewise components of texts, they differ in their function, and I can 
> distinguish them functionally. Both, tense (which domain is in the 
> A-series) and aspect (which rules the B-series) are connected to the verb, 
> and the finite verb may or may not express one of them or both – that 
> always depends on the temporal structure of the text they get into. So only 
> the text as a whole makes clear aspectual and tense relations. A text must 
> comprise of at least one word, and it has to be uttered and received (here 
> we have the triangle). So, by this definition, I always use tense when I 
> create a text (cf. Comrie, Tense, 1985, p.122f), but the finite verbal form 
> must not necessarily refer to a specific point in time – as we have seen, 
> it very often does not. This is not deficient, as there are periphrastic 
> signals.
>
>
>
> When we apply these differentiations to Biblical Hebrew, we can describe 
> the function of the verb, e.g.: Gen 2:19
>
> וַיָּבֵא֙ אֶל־הָ֣אָדָ֔ם לִרְא֖וֹת מַה־יִּקְרָא־ל֑וֹ
>
>
>
> In this text it is very hard to believe  that the finite verbal form 
> וַיָּבֵא֙ is not tense. Just by receiving the word I know that in the 
> A-series I am advised to look at the past. The second verb  יִּקְרָא is in 
> the past too – but its form does not tell me that. Instead it describes the 
> future of the first verb. As it connects the two events („bring to see“ and 
> „call“) inextricably, it represents aspect. The “bringing to see” is 
> earlier than “call”, and this relation will never change. Besides the 
> prospective aspect there is iterativity too. As god brings along a lot of 
> animals, Adam has a hard job to carry out, which takes its time. But the 
> verbal forms do not provide us with information about durativity or 
> frequentness; these we sense by analyzing the temporal structure of the 
> text as a whole.
>
>
>
>
>
> Rolf, regarding 1 Kgs 1:5 I might have used the wrong terms. What I meant 
> were the classes of the speech act theory, and in English I should have 
> used “declaration” instead of “declarative”. To my mind declarations are 
> connected to the suffix conjugations, but not to the prefix conjugation. 
> There’s a chapter in my book about declarations, so we can talk this over 
> when you have got hand on it.
>
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Frank Matheus, University of Münster
>
>
>