Hi Rolf,
Comments below:
Dear David,
It takes much time to participate in discussions like this one, and I am
on the
point of finishing a book. So I cannot continue much longer. Just a few
short questions:
I agree, I have work to continue, too. But your prompting helps to think
of things in different ways.
1) What is the "prototypical funtion" of a verb? How can it be
identified? On the basis of texts? Or is the identification just
guesswork without any controlling parameters to check the conclusions?
Prototype theory is now used within (functional?) linguistics for
understanding conceptual categorisation of lexical stock,
parts-of-speech, etc (see, eg, Croft 2001; Croft & Cruse 2004). Central
to this theory is that some members of a category are more prototypical
members, while others are more peripheral. Regarding the prototypical
function of a verbal form, this is admittedly a difficult task for a
dead language. This is where typology is helpful (see Miller 2004): it
provides a framework in which the possibilities and functional
constraints are shown. Added to this is the area of grammaticalisation
theory. All of this helps to reveal what the options and non-options
are, the identification of constructions, the primacy of certain
constructions over others, etc.
2) How can we distinguish between past tense (grammaticalised location
in time) and past reference (when the reference is based on the context
and not on the verb form)?
For BH I suggest: though an analysis of paradigmatic verbal contrasts,
diachronic change, constructional analysis, etc. What we do know is that
Hebrew moves from aspect to tense over time. At some point, then, there
will be a stage where the language is unstable with respect to tense and
aspect. It is not as if one week the language marked verbs for aspect
and then the next marked tense. At some stage there will have been a
state of flux and change. I think this is something of the case for BH.
As such, tense-only and aspect-only theories do not seem to work: hence
all the debate.
at identifying prototypical functions, they are just that, prototypical.
The language has not absolutely moved to tense, so there are
discrepancies, exceptions, whatever you want to call them. But this is
only natural for language.
Regards,
David Kummerow.
_______________________________________________
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.