Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Dear Kimmo,

It is good to hear from you again.

If tense is defined as "grammaticalized location in time (Comrie)," I have 
problems with your statement: "traditional past tense (as a grammatical 
category) does not correspond exactly to the semantic past tense." If we 
accepts Comrie's definition, "semantic past tense" should have have read 
"semantic past reference. We cannot have two different kinds of "past tense." 
This is not nitpicking, but highly significant in a discussion of tense and 
aspect. For example, are the WAYYIQTOLs in narrative YIQTOLs with past 
reference, or do they have an intrinsic  past tense, or do they represent the 
perfective aspect?



Best regards,


Rolf Furuli
Stavern
Norway


Lørdag 31. August 2013 18:08 CEST skrev 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?
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