Well, Rolf, it seems that you accept discourse analysis as evidence of how forms are used. But if this evidence "can tell us nothing about the meaning of YIQTOL, QATAL, WAYYIQTOL, and WEQATAL", what can tell us about their meaning? We have no evidence other than the text. So either we have to learn about the meaning from the patterns we find in the text, or we have to conclude that we can have no idea what the text means.
You then go on to invite me to reanalyse the text based on an assumption of the results of that analysis. In particular you insist that they assume that "the prefixed WAWs are just conjunctions", although past studies have demonstrated that these prefixed WAWs have specific discourse functions. That is methodologically untenable. I agree that analysts should not assume the four conjugation model either. But they should work with the real data which they find in the text and not with presuppositions forced on them.
Peter Kirk
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