Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kimmo Huovila <kimmo.huovila AT kolumbus.fi>]

It is not so much that semantic aspect, tense, and mood are poorly defined, 
but grammatical categories of aspect, tense, and mood need not be exactly the 
same as the semantic definitions. If there is sufficient overlap, then we can 
call the form aspect, tense, or mood. Often the grammatical categories are 
intertwined with respect to the semantic ones.

To give an English illustration, the traditional past tense (as a grammatical 
category) does not correspond exactly to the semantic past tense, as 
expressed by the fact that present-referring counterfactual conditionals use 
the past tense. There is no trouble defining pastness, it's just that 
pastness does not correspond 100 % with the past tense as a grammatical 
category. There is significant overlap, though, justifying calling the form 
past tense. Thus "*I went there tomorrow" is not right.

Perhaps Hebrew should be approached the same way, except that there are less 
grammatical categories used to code TAM, so we should expect tense, aspect, 
and mood to be even more intertwined.

Kimmo Huovila

On Sat, 31 Aug 2013 03:51:21 -0700
K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:

> The story that I seem to be getting here in b-hebrew is that if TAM doesn’t
> fit a particular language, then redefine TAM until it does fit? So when the
> conjugation within a language doesn’t have a time reference, what then does
> “T” refer to? Does it stand for anything? The same with “A”? If you
> redefine all the words, what happens to communication about the language?

> So the same
> way with TAM—if the meanings from one language to another are incompatible,
> doesn’t that destroy communications?