Kevin:
What I learned in class is that both perfects and imperfects can have a
past, present and future tense. ... Watts' book
suggests the aspect notion over time/tense. He says perfects are completed
action and imperfects are continuous action.
Kevin, you might want to ponder on a BH datum:
Clauses with maHar 'tomorrow' never have 'qatal' or wayyiqtol' as
the main verb. Zero out of 52. That is fairly significant statistical
evidence that is against the prediction of 'aspect-only' or 'modal-
only' theories of the Hebrew verb.
While you are musing, please note
that I am not advocating 'time-only' either, I'm only pointing
out that time/tense seems to be involved in the underdifferentiated
Hebrew verb system, that is, underdifferentiated from an Indo-
Europeanan perspective: the Hebrew indicative only has a two-way
morphological distinction in simple indicative, two way distinction
in sequential-clauses (wyyqtl and wqtl), plus participles.
George:
Kevin,
It seems the book you've got uses an Aktionsart approach
('type of action'), which has been largely left behind in grammatical
analysis of Hebrew these days. It just doesn't work. Aspect is
definitely where you need to head.
I disagree on two fronts.
I suspect that the issue is one of definition of the metalinguistic
terminology rather than substance. And as mentioned above,
'aspect-only' is definitely not where someone should head.
Randall Buth
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
Biblical Language Center
Really Learn
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