ken, thanks for pointing out (again?) andrason's interesting paper. linguistically speaking, his techniques are far too sophisticated for me to comment on, at the moment; but they seem to elaborate an in-depth cognitive theory which, so to speak, follows the neurons as they process the information from words all the way to meanings. clearly the linguistics of the future. but i take it, it is only a preliminary sketch. i still do not see the details that sustain the theory.
my main question is, though, whether all this artillery is indeed necessary. there is a situation that these techniques might serve many purposes in deeper text analysis, beyond the BH verb system - for example, automatic translation or text interactive software; but, all the same, there is also the possibility that they will never be applied to the original task: the BH verb system. the reason is that, in most languages, verbs can be studied by FORMAL STRUCTURAL APPROACHES which ignore 95% of the cognitive processing. in other words, grammar IS a surface activity. i do not see why BH should be different, even if it is still a hard nut (not for long!). i am not qualified enough to comment on andrason's attack on cook's methods, but i will make a few remarks. first, in my mind indeed it is difficult to see how the aspectual approach alone can account for the BHVS. nontheless, i believe that a synthesis of existing approaches, including the aspectual, should be sufficient to solve the problem. something like randall buth's pragmatic approach (unfortunately, he is no more on our list. i wonder why...) which mixes tensual, aspectual and discourse ideas. > (1) Cook does not use paths as an explanation of the synchronic data; he still understands Biblical Hebrew grams as static products of determined diachronic trajectories; it can be argued that the OT is sufficiently uniform to conduct sinchronic studies; besides, my impression from casual reading of various sources is that there are still too many unknowns on the temporal axis to submit the text to a true panchronic analysis. > (3) he retains binary opposition, which is incompatible with grammaticalization and path frameworks; incompatible with grammaticalization: yet to be shown! one last remark: i would like to correct a mis-translation in one of his examples, which also changes completely the verb analysis there (in his p48): isa 51:12 מִי-אַתְּ וַתִּירְאִי "what are you afraid of - or who" a more correct translation would be (mekhon mamre) יב מִי-אַתְּ וַתִּירְאִי מֵאֱנוֹשׁ יָמוּת 12 I, who art thou, that thou art afraid of man that shall die best nir cohen _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
