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Anchoring world and time in biblical Hebrew

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2004

GALIA HATAV
GALIA HATAV
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Abstract

One of the most puzzling issues in biblical Hebrew has been its verbal system. In this article, I deal with one of the forms, namely wayyiqtol, suggesting that its meaning is compositional, calculated from three components: a verbal base and two morphemes. The verbal base is shown to be modal, involving quantification over possible worlds. The two morphemes prefixed to the verbal base restrict its modal nature. One morpheme functions like the definite article in a noun phrase; it picks out one of the possible worlds, the familiar actual world (Wo), and anchors the event into it. The other morpheme builds a reference-time, locating the event in time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , November 2004 , pp. 491 - 526
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This article is an extended version of a paper read at the conference of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), 2000. It was presented in departmental seminars at the Linguistics Section of the English Department at Hebrew University, the Linguistics Department at Tel Aviv University, the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at Ben Gurion University, and the Program in Linguistics at Emory University. I am grateful to the participants in all of these presentations for their valuable comments. I also want to thank my friends and colleagues Mohammad Mohammad and Edit Doron for discussing the subject with me prior to its presentation. Finally, I wish to thank the anonymous JL referees for their generous comments, which I used to improve the paper in both content and organization.