Hi Ruth! Thank you for your insightful comments. I think you've shown quite well that we need to distinguish the nature of an action (Aktionsart) from how it is depicted and presented to a reader (aspect). The two are not the same, but they are often confused.
Moving on from your discussion, the stylistic variation between qatal and yiqtol forms in poetic contexts are often used in situations where time is either irrelevant (eg. gnomic presentations) or of purely secondary concern (eg. a past occurrence of a proverbial example). This stylistic switching between verb forms is something that I believe shows that tense is totally irrelevant to the verb forms themselves. Tense is a translation issue for when we translate Hebrew into European languages that have tense, and is discerned by deictic time markers within the context. The mistake we make is to think that tense is somehow encoded into the Hebrew verbs themselves. But it isn't. If we can switch equally between a qatal and a yiqtol in a poetic context, the variation is something other than tense. Type of action (Aktionsart) doesn't provide as much explanatory power as aspect, in my opinion. On that front, I don't think the perfect-imperfective polarity always works. There are occasions were a qatal or a wayyiqtol implies an imperfective presentation, which simply can't fit in the classic perfective-imperfective models that insist on qatal and wayyiqtol as perfective. Once again, I think this polarity is coming from a European language perspective. A much better explanation of the variation in aspect is according to definiteness and indefiniteness. Just as one might switch between 'a horse' and 'the horse' in nouns, so we can switch between 'an action in particular' and 'an action in general'. GEORGE ATHAS Dean of Research, Moore Theological College (moore.edu.au) Sydney, Australia From: Ruth Mathys <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Tuesday, 28 May 2013 3:04 PM To: B-Hebrew <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] to rolf The patterns which are clear in Proverbs 31:1031 can be applied to the rest of Tanakh and still make sense, whereas your model doesn¹t fit that passage. In that passage, all the verbs are used exactly the same, as far as your model is concerned, a model according to European languages. They are with one exception indefinite, present tense, imperfective aspect, indicative mood; the one exception is subjunctive mood. I find this last sentence confusing. Following the thread of Karl's argument, I take him to mean that the situation being described in Prov 31:10-31 is one that has present-time reference ('present tense'), is being viewed in an open-ended way ('imperfective aspect') and is proverbial/generic rather than referring to a specific individual ('indefinite'). Part of the problem is using terms like 'indicative mood' to talk about the real-world (or hypothetical-world) situation being described, when in fact these terms can only properly be used to describe language forms. There is no such thing as an 'indicative' situation, only an indicative verb form or construction. In other words, the 'indicativeness' exists entirely within the sentence used to describe the situation. It isn't a property of the situation itself. Actually, this passage even begins with a rhetorical question, so even the first verb form probably isn't indicative (if that is even a relevant category for the Hebrew verb system). The same is true for perfective vs imperfective aspect. Even when a situation lends itself to being described by a particular form (e.g. perfective aspect is the default option for describing past time), the speaker usually has the option of choosing a different form to communicate a specific shade of meaning. In English, the answer to "What did you do?" can be "I didn't do anything" or "I haven't done anything" or even "I wasn't doing anything" depending on the slant that the speaker wants to put on the situation. It's true that terms like 'present tense' often are used rather indiscriminately. It is sometimes used to refer to a morphological form, and sometimes to the temporal reference of the verb. I wish there were standardised terms to keep the two concepts distinct, but we're not there yet. Anyway, so I don't think it's legitimate to say that all the verbs are "indefinite, present tense, imperfective aspect, indicative mood". It is only legitimate to list the different verb *forms* used (some are yiqtol, some are qatal, some are wayyiqtol, etc.), give an *opinion* about the overall situation being referred to (a generic description of a generic ideal woman) and then systematically relate the various verb forms to that situation. The argument seems to be that since the situation is generic and present-time (or timeless?), the variation of verb forms must be due to something other than tense or aspect. The trick is to then formulate a positive explanation of the variation -- what are the different meanings that the writer can evoke (using alternative verb forms) to describe the same general situation? In any case, why assume that Prov 31:10-31 is generic? John A. Cook in "Genericity, Tense, and Verbal Patterns in the Sentence Literature of Proverbs" (sorry, no idea of the complete reference) argues that "... qatal along with the few examples of wayyiqtol in Proverbs may portray past tense anecdotes from which the reader is left to extract a general maxim". Instead of making an a priori decision about the situation being described by a particular passage and then trying to read the verb forms based on that decision, it is just as valid to try assigning particular values to each verb form and then see if the passage can be read meaningfully (is there a genre we haven't considered yet?). Ruth Mathys _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
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