Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ruth Mathys <ruth_mathys AT sil.org>]

Karl,
 
> I don¹t reject TAM as a tool for understanding languages. What I say is
> that it¹s too limited. It doesn¹t explain the patterns observed in Biblical
> Hebrew.

IMHO TAM is not a model, it's a checklist of things to look for when
investigating verbs.

If Hebrew verbs aren't marked for TAM, they must be communicating something
else.  I went looking for a simple list of things that verbs typically can
mark (cross-linguistically), and found this useful site:

http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/index.html

The author lists the following features that can be marked on verbs:

- gender
- number
- person
- respect (honorifics, politeness)
- tense
- aspect
- mood
- polarity (assertion vs negation)
- transitivity
- voice
- evidentiality (what is the source of information?)
- manner and circumstance (e.g. while standing up, only a little bit,
towards the jungle, in the evening)


A number of these could be lumped together into a mega-category of "ways
that a verb marks what are the significant participants in the event, and
how they are involved in it".  In Hebrew that includes subject agreement,
object suffixes and the binyanim (marking transitivity/voice).  But the
subject agreement markers come in two clearly defined sets which are
independent of the binyan distinction.  So there must be another variable at
work.  Looking through the above list, it's pretty clear to me that this
other variable is something in the tense-aspect-mood constellation -- which
is also to be expected given how common it is, cross-linguistically, for
these features to be marked on verbs.

The reason these three features are commonly grouped together by the acronym
TAM is because they are so often mixed up within a given language, with the
same grammatical marker having components of more than one feature.  Do they
have something in common that leads the human mind to lump them together? --
they all communicate something about the relationship between the event and
'reality'?  How come marking location in time is so much more common than
marking location in space???

I think, Karl, that your understanding of Hebrew verbs does fall within the
TAM category, but it's a pretty big category with plenty of space for
different perspectives.

Are there any other meaning possibilities for the Hebrew verb that aren't on
the list above?  Rocine argues (if I understand him correctly) that
wayyiqtol forms focus on the event itself and qatal forms treat the event as
an attribute of the subject.  But that seems weird to me because I thought
finite verbs of any kind focus on the event, and it's participles that treat
an event as an attribute.  But it's worth a thought.


> A prime example is Proverbs 31:10­31‹with the exception of the first
> Yiqtol, all the other verbs in that section are in the context of present
> tense, imperfective aspect, indicative modality. Yet there is a regular
> pattern that explains the use of the Qatal and Yiqtol verb conjugations, a
> pattern that isn¹t described by TAM.
> 
> When we take the pattern as evidenced by this Proverbs passage, and apply
> it to most of the Yiqtols (and Wayiqtols) found in narrative, we find it
> fits without resorting to tense. Tense is told not by the conjugation, but
> by the context.

Karl, you keep asserting that this passage refers to present time, but it
doesn't -- unless you believe that the narrator of the passage is an
eye-witness giving a play-by-play description of a particular woman's
actions.  You agree that the passage is gnomic, and by definition a gnomic
utterance is timeless.  It's the difference between "The eagle is circling
to swoop on its prey" (present reference) and "The early bird catches the
worm" (timeless).

At least in English, just about any verb form can be used in a gnomic
context and still maintain the timelessness (obviously this may not apply to
Hebrew, but that's something you would have to prove).  Like this:

    Listen (imperative) to my thinking (gerund) about the ideal wife.
    She would be (some sort of modal) someone who always makes your
    life good (present).  She studied (simple past) hard at school, and
    she encourages (present) her children to do (infinitive) the same.
    She's always helping (present continuous) other people.  Once you
    have married (perfect) her, you will never regret it (future).

And so on.

I'm actually not sure what kind of genre context could conclusively rule out
temporal reference as part of a verb form's meaning.  You'd have to
carefully control for every variety of syntactic context within the overall
genre context.

BTW you can use the English future perfect to refer to the past:

A: What time is Donna's flight due in?
B: 10 minutes ago.
A: Oh, then she'll have already got back by now.

There's some modal nuance in there, but that's why it's called TAM --
because the three strands are so difficult to separate in practice.


Ruth