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Hinn¯Eh's Interaction with the Verbal System in Biblical Hebrew Prose

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Hinn¯Eh's Interaction with the Verbal System in Biblical Hebrew Prose Hinneh¯ ’s Interaction with the Verbal System in Biblical Hebrew Prose Zeineb Sellami M.A Thesis First Reader: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee Second Reader: Itamar Francez Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations The University of Chicago March 30, 2020 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Theoretical Framework and Assumptions 2 2.1 Semantic Preliminaries . .2 2.1.1 Grammatical Aspect . .2 2.1.2 The Perfective and the Perfect . .8 2.1.3 Lexical Aspect . .9 2.2 Tense and Aspect in the Hebrew Bible . 10 2.3 Summary................................................. 14 3 Literature Review and Methodology 14 3.1 The Meanings of Hinneh¯ ........................................ 14 3.2 Data and Methodology . 16 4 Analysis of Hinneh¯ in Verbal Clauses 18 4.1 Hinneh¯ and the Perfective . 18 4.1.1 Topic Time Utterance Time . 19 ⊃ 4.1.2 Topic Time Utterance Time . 29 Á 4.1.3 Topic Time Utterance Time . 32 Â 4.1.4 Stative Predicates . 34 4.1.5 Summary . 37 4.2 Hinneh¯ and the Imperfective . 38 5 Cross-linguistic Parallels to hinneh¯ 41 5.1 Hittite................................................... 41 5.2 Neo-Aramaic............................................... 42 6 Conclusion 44 i List of Abbreviations 1: 1st person. 2: 2nd person. 3: 3rd person. ACC: Accusative. COMP: Complementizer. CONJ: Conjunction. DEIC: Deictic. DEF: Definite article. DOM: Definite Object Marker. GEN: Genitive. IMP: Imperative. INF: Infinitive. IPFV: Imperfective. LOC: Locative. NEG: Negation. PASS: Passive. PERF: Perfect. PFV: Perfective. PL: Plural. PRET: Preterite. PTCP: Participle. SG: Singular. ii 1 Introduction descriptively referred to as a presentative particle in the literature, is an element found ,(הִנּ¦ה!) ¯Hinneh 1060 times in the biblical text (Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe 2011). Usually translated as “lo,” and “behold”—without much sensitivity to its context of appearance—it is described by Joüon (1947:502) as “un adverbe démonstratif” used to “renforcer l’affirmation”, and has been the subject of a fair number of studies, the most exhaustive of which is Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe 2011. Being a presentative fundamentally, i.e., pointing out to physical or abstract entities, in most—if not all— instances, hinneh¯ appears with its referent, meaning that it virtually never stands as a whole utterance (Gzella 2013). As such, the literature treating hinneh¯ usually takes into account the context in which it appears, striving to delimit an “original meaning” from which potential secondary uses derive (Sadka 2001:492). To cite only a couple, Zewi (1996) sketches a modest syntactic account of its use, opposing it to w@hinneh¯ (the presentative preceded by the conjunction ‘and’), while Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011) offer an exclusively cognitive-based approach, analyzing hinneh¯ and w@hinneh¯ as the same entity, and arguing that it is a mirative marker, a type of evidential denoting surprise. While these different analyses are very useful and provide a better understanding of hinneh¯ , not much attention has been paid to the type of clause that is introduced by this presentative, and its interaction with the elements in that clause, particularly which verb forms it occurs with. The aim of this paper is to fill this lacuna by focusing exclusively on hinneh¯ in verbal sentences, in an attempt to show that the presentative is not merely a discourse device, but rather an element used by the authors of the text for different but related purposes depending on the type of clause it appears in, in order to convey a meaning that is not necessarily that of surprise, or any other type of cognitive information. For instance, hinneh¯ can be used as a simple deictic in verbless clauses, pointing to physical or abstract entities (Cohen 2014). As for its use in verbal clauses, this paper shows that hinneh¯ interacts with the finite verbal forms of Biblical Hebrew (BH). More precisely, I will argue that the perfective stem qatal¯ —whose unmarked interpretation corresponds to English did x—preceded by hinneh¯ sees its sets of possible readings reduced by the presentative to a perfect of the English type has done x, and as such, the latter plays an important role in the language that deserves a careful description. In this case, BH is not an isolated example, and this study will draw on cross-linguistic comparison from both living and dead languages. In order to accurately describe the role of hinneh¯ with regards to the BH perfective, my analysis will be couched in a Neo-Reichenbachian theory of tense and aspect: The data in this thesis will be interpreted following the framework first proposed by Reichenbach (1947) and further developed by Klein (1994). The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: §2 describes the theoretical framework used in this analysis and provides useful background on the Biblical Hebrew verbal system, §3 gives a literature review on hinneh¯ and explains the methodology, while §4 is dedicated to the analysis of hinneh¯ and its interaction with the Hebrew verbal forms. Finally §5 explores possible parallels and §6 concludes. 1 2 Theoretical Framework and Assumptions The goal of this section is to discuss aspect from a theoretical and practical point of view: I will talk about relevant notions from the tense and aspect literature (§2.1), as well as how these notions are materialized in BH (§2.2) . This in turn will give a solid theoretical foundation for the understanding of the interaction between hinneh¯ and the perfective aspect from a semantic standpoint. 2.1 Semantic Preliminaries The term “aspect” involves two sub-categories equally as important in order to understand any verbal system, since both interact constantly with one another (Swart 2012:752). Grammatical aspect or view- point aspect (§2.1.1) involves “different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (Comrie 1976), while lexical aspect or aktionsart (§2.1.3) concerns the situation itself, i.e., “the properties of eventualities [...] expressed by verbs” prior to marking them for tense or aspect. In discussing gram- matical aspect, I will also tackle the closely related category of tense, which “serves [...] to anchor the situation described by the sentence to the time axis” (Swart 2012:752). 2.1.1 Grammatical Aspect In this paper, I will mainly use Klein’s (1994) terminology and ideas about the encoding of time in lan- guage, and will draw on other authors’ analyses when needed. The choice of this terminology in par- ticular stems from the fact that the literature on tense and aspect contains a wide array of terms that designate the same thing and Klein’s terminology has the advantage of containing a coherent set of pa- rameters that allow to capture the semantic differences between aspectual categories. Drawing on Re- ichenbach’s (1947) seminal work in which he introduces the now commonly accepted temporal points of speech, event, and reference, Klein proposes a more refined theory of tense and aspect in order to handle temporal relationships. Klein’s (1994) refinement of Reichenbach’s three points, beyond giving them different names as shown in (1), consists in allowing them to be intervals rather than just points on the time axis, which allows us to obtain a finer description of aspectual categories and the differences between them. This framework is essential as it will enable us to derive the proper reading of the verbal forms in the corpus without prior assumptions about their meanings. Thus, Klein defines three main intervals that interact with one another in the description of eventualities,1 provided in (1). (1)T EMPORAL POINTS FOR A THEORY OF TENSEAND ASPECT: a. Time of Utterance (TU) or Reichenbach’s “speech time”: The time at which the utterance is expressed. b. Situation Time (TSit) or Reichenbach’s “event time”: The time at which the situation obtains or occurs. The situation is described by the non-finite parts of the sentence. 1. The word “eventuality” is a cover term for events and states, and is thus a neutral term for all kinds of predicates (activities, states, accomplishments, and achievements). Predicate types are discussed in §2.1.3. 2 c. Topic Time (TT) or Reichenbach’s “reference time”: The time talked about, the time about which something is asserted or asked, i.e., the interval for which a claim is made that the situation is true. In order to illustrate these concepts, I reproduce in (2) the example used by the author: (2) A judge asks a witness: “What did you notice when you looked into the room?” to which the witness answers : “There was a book on the table.” In (2), TU happens in court when the witness answers the question, TT is when he looked into the room, which by context, is before TU, and finally TSit is the book being on the table. This is the non-finite component of the utterance, expressed as [book be on table] (Klein’s (1994) notation that will be used henceforth) and is not inherently marked for any temporal or aspectual dimension. These three time intervals are very important because their relationships define what pertains to tense and what pertains to aspect. As such, according to Klein (1994) tenses are defined by the relationships between TT and TU, whereas aspects are defined by the relationships between TSit and TT, yielding the definitions in table 1.2 TENSES ASPECTS Present: TT TU Imperfective: TSit TT ⊃ ⊃ Past: TT TU Perfective: TT Tsit Á ¶ Future: TT TU Perfect: TSit TT Â Á Table 1: Tenses and Aspects according to Klein (1994) The present tense is characterized by TT including TU, that is to say TU is a subinterval of TT. By contrast, the past tense is obtained whenever TT precedes TU and the future tense whenever TT follows TU.
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