Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] The mystery of vav-consequtive
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 13:23:00 -0500
I'm a new-ish subscriber to this particular list so forgive redundancy.
I'd simply like to point toward John A. Cook's 2002 Wisconsin-Madison
dissertation, written under (my former classmate) Cynthia Miller, "The
Biblical Hebrew Verbal System: A Grammaticalization Approach." It's out or
is due to be out in published form, so far as I know, in the Linguistic
Studies in Ancient West Semitic series. He concludes some interesting and,
in my opinion, lucid thoughts about the verbal system. About the wayyiqtol,
I understood him to argue that it DOES commonly convey past TENSE within the
primarily ASPECTUAL world of prefix/"imperfect" and suffix/"perfect"
conjugations.