Tal Goldfajn
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198269533
- eISBN:
- 9780191683671
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269533.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies
This introductory chapter explains the coverage and objective of this book, which is the temporal interpretation of word order and expression of time in the biblical Hebrew (BH) verb. This book ...
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This introductory chapter explains the coverage and objective of this book, which is the temporal interpretation of word order and expression of time in the biblical Hebrew (BH) verb. This book postulates that the use of BH verb forms in classical BH is not arbitrary. It proposes two parameters that may be used to organize more consistently the observations concerning the time indications of the BH verb. The first parameter deals with the existence of two initial temporal set-ups and the second is about the role of verb order sequences in setting the temporal relations between the events within each temporal set-up.Less
This introductory chapter explains the coverage and objective of this book, which is the temporal interpretation of word order and expression of time in the biblical Hebrew (BH) verb. This book postulates that the use of BH verb forms in classical BH is not arbitrary. It proposes two parameters that may be used to organize more consistently the observations concerning the time indications of the BH verb. The first parameter deals with the existence of two initial temporal set-ups and the second is about the role of verb order sequences in setting the temporal relations between the events within each temporal set-up.
Tal Goldfajn
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198269533
- eISBN:
- 9780191683671
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269533.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Biblical Studies
This book addresses the problem of temporal interpretation within narrative of the biblical Hebrew verb, thus exploring the broader issue of the expression of time in language and the ways in which ...
More
This book addresses the problem of temporal interpretation within narrative of the biblical Hebrew verb, thus exploring the broader issue of the expression of time in language and the ways in which we can attempt to understand and represent it. The author offers a summary of this controversy, which has been argued over since at least the tenth century, presenting previous scholarly opinions and theories. She argues that one possible way of understanding the fundamental meanings of the Hebrew verbs is by examining the role played in ordering time by the four main verb forms used in biblical Hebrew narrative. Accordingly, emphasis is given to the intersentential use of these forms and the variety of interesting ways in which they establish the order of events.Less
This book addresses the problem of temporal interpretation within narrative of the biblical Hebrew verb, thus exploring the broader issue of the expression of time in language and the ways in which we can attempt to understand and represent it. The author offers a summary of this controversy, which has been argued over since at least the tenth century, presenting previous scholarly opinions and theories. She argues that one possible way of understanding the fundamental meanings of the Hebrew verbs is by examining the role played in ordering time by the four main verb forms used in biblical Hebrew narrative. Accordingly, emphasis is given to the intersentential use of these forms and the variety of interesting ways in which they establish the order of events.
Anne Mucha and Malte Zimmermann
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226363523
- eISBN:
- 9780226363660
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226363660.003.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Semantics and Pragmatics
This chapter discusses the temporal interpretation in two West African languages: Hausa and Medumba. These two languagtes differ significantly in their grammatical coding of tense, aspect, and ...
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This chapter discusses the temporal interpretation in two West African languages: Hausa and Medumba. These two languagtes differ significantly in their grammatical coding of tense, aspect, and modality (TAM). Hausa is a tenseless language, in which tense is not grammatically marked, whereas Medumba is a graded-tense language and as such it has a rich system of temporal morphemes expressing fine-grained temporal distinctions such as recent past, remote past, current future, and remote future. The authors say that Hausa does not have a linguistic cateogry of tense. Rather, the temporal interpretation in Hausa is determined by Aktionsart, aspect, and pragmatic principles. In Medumba the graded-tense effects are not due to the presence of multiple tense morphemes, and the apparent multiple temporal markers belong to different categories, including tense, aspect, and modality, which interact in complex ways to give rise to many temporal interpretations. Both Hausa and Medumba express future-oriented readings with a modal element, showing that there is no category ‘future tense’ in these languages. The chapter has a number of theoretical implications that address directly the ‘mismatches’ between notional and morphological categories.Less
This chapter discusses the temporal interpretation in two West African languages: Hausa and Medumba. These two languagtes differ significantly in their grammatical coding of tense, aspect, and modality (TAM). Hausa is a tenseless language, in which tense is not grammatically marked, whereas Medumba is a graded-tense language and as such it has a rich system of temporal morphemes expressing fine-grained temporal distinctions such as recent past, remote past, current future, and remote future. The authors say that Hausa does not have a linguistic cateogry of tense. Rather, the temporal interpretation in Hausa is determined by Aktionsart, aspect, and pragmatic principles. In Medumba the graded-tense effects are not due to the presence of multiple tense morphemes, and the apparent multiple temporal markers belong to different categories, including tense, aspect, and modality, which interact in complex ways to give rise to many temporal interpretations. Both Hausa and Medumba express future-oriented readings with a modal element, showing that there is no category ‘future tense’ in these languages. The chapter has a number of theoretical implications that address directly the ‘mismatches’ between notional and morphological categories.
Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198717188
- eISBN:
- 9780191785931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198717188.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
This chapter explores an important class of interpretive dependencies often attributed to general pragmatic principles: temporal connections between successive sentences in narrative discourse. The ...
More
This chapter explores an important class of interpretive dependencies often attributed to general pragmatic principles: temporal connections between successive sentences in narrative discourse. The chapter argues that such cases are better characterized in grammatical terms through models of discourse anaphora (a representation that allows elements of logical form to have dependent interpretations across sentences), and presupposition (elements of meaning that constrain how anaphora is resolved). The chapter explains why such models are necessary and why they must be part of speakers' grammars. The chapter concludes by considering the broader dialectic that researchers have used to defend pragmatic analyses. Grammatical explanations of temporal interpretation, and other dependencies in discourse that depend on the dynamics of presupposition and anaphora, derive their ambiguities rather than stipulating them, and so do not fall prey to the criticisms that are often voiced against ambiguity accounts in the Gricean program.Less
This chapter explores an important class of interpretive dependencies often attributed to general pragmatic principles: temporal connections between successive sentences in narrative discourse. The chapter argues that such cases are better characterized in grammatical terms through models of discourse anaphora (a representation that allows elements of logical form to have dependent interpretations across sentences), and presupposition (elements of meaning that constrain how anaphora is resolved). The chapter explains why such models are necessary and why they must be part of speakers' grammars. The chapter concludes by considering the broader dialectic that researchers have used to defend pragmatic analyses. Grammatical explanations of temporal interpretation, and other dependencies in discourse that depend on the dynamics of presupposition and anaphora, derive their ambiguities rather than stipulating them, and so do not fall prey to the criticisms that are often voiced against ambiguity accounts in the Gricean program.
