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 ≺ 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 POINTSFORA THEORYOF 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 ≺ ⊇ Future: TT TU Perfect: TSit TT Â ≺ 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. This is simply a finer description of tense as a deictic category: The deictic center is TU and eventualities are referred to on the time axis relative to that center. As for the aspectual categories, no deixis is involved, rather, it is the relationship between TSit and TT that gives us the aspect of a given verbal form, no matter where these two intervals stand relative to TU. Following Klein (1994), the imperfective is characterized by TT being a subinterval of TSit, while the opposite relationship holds for the perfective, where TSit is included in TT. The perfect aspect is different from the other two aspects in that it obtains whenever TSit precedes TT. While the relationships between TT and TU defining tense are usually easy to pick up from the context, defining aspect is a bit more tricky. For that reason, the few examples and figures3 below illustrate the aspectual categories.

2. Key to table 1: = properly includes, = includes, = precedes, = follows. The difference between proper inclusion and ⊃ ⊇ ≺ Â inclusion is that proper inclusion does not allow for the two intervals to be coextensive (i.e., start and end at the same time) while inclusion does. This difference is made clearer below in the discussion on the perfective aspect, which allows for TT and TSit to be coextensive. 3. The template for the figures was made by Ian Hollenbaugh (UCLA).

3 Beginning with the imperfective and looking at (2) again, the book being on the table (TSit) starts before the witness looks into the room, and ends after he leaves. We could assume that the book has always and will always be on the table, or not. The important part here is that the time of the witness looking into the room (TT) is included in the time of the book being on the table (TSit), or TSit TT. Schematically, ⊃ this can be represented as in fig. 1:

Figure 1: The imperfective aspect (past)

look into room [TT]

TU (time) book on table [TSit]

Of course, this representation can be shifted to TU or after TU, and the form would still have an imper- fective reading, but in the present or the future tense.

On the other hand, the perfective aspect is of the opposite relationship between TSit and TT. For example, in a sentence such as (3), TT yesterday properly includes TSit [do homework] (TT TSit), as represented ⊃ in fig. 2.

(3) Yesterday, I did my homework.

Figure 2: The perfective aspect (past)

Yesterday [TT]

TU (time) do homework [TSit]

In the table above, the definition of the perfective allows for TT to include TSit properly or not, such that it covers the uses of the perfective where TT and TSit are coextensive. This type of perfective is found when the TT is bounded as in Smith’s (1997:11) example in (4).

(4) He reigned for thirty years.

Figure 3: The perfective aspect in (4) (TSit = TT)

thirty years [TT]

TU (time) reign [TSit]

In her initial use of (4), Smith (1997:11) presents the same sentence in French with both perfective (regna) and imperfective (regnait) morphology, arguing that the two sentences differ in viewpoint, the one using the perfective presenting the event as “closed off, or as having a well defined end” and the one using

4 the imperfective “present[ing] the described episode as open”. I do not agree with this description since using the imperfective morphology with dynamic predicates in relation to bounded TTs is not felicitous in French, at least in unmarked contexts, making her example problematic to begin with. Moreover, from a theoretical perspective, having both the perfective and the imperfective as possible categories with bounded TTs in the same language would amount to having partially the same definition for the two forms, as both would have as part of their denotation the possibility of TSit = TT. This would be a problem since the two aspects are theoretically and empirically distinct categories: Some languages may have TSit = TT for their perfective and others for their imperfective, but it would be problematic for the same language to have TSit = TT for both aspects. Another motivation for keeping the possibility for TSit and TT to be coextensive only in the perfective is that in BH, the language in question in this paper, only the perfective form allows for such a possibility. For these reasons, only the perfective aspect allows for TSit = TT as part of its denotation, the imperfective requiring proper inclusion of TT in TSit.

Finally, according to Klein (1994), the perfect aspect is characterized by a precedence relationship be- tween TSit and TT: This relation can be found in different points in time relative to TU. For example, (5) contains a pluperfect with TT TU, and can be represented as in fig. 4. ≺

(5) When the professor came in, the students had already done their homework.

Figure 4: Perfect Aspect (past)

Professor come in [TT]

TU (time) do homework [TSit]

In the present perfect, TT TU (= the present tense) as shown in the representation of (6) in fig. 5. ⊃

(6) I have lost my glasses.

Figure 5: Perfect Aspect (present tense)

Now [TT]

TU (time) lose glasses [TSit]

Beyond this preliminary definition, the perfect aspect deserves careful attention since it is a major cat- egory that will be looked at in this study. As such, let us start by looking at the different types of English perfects represented in (7).4

4. Examples and ideas heavily based on Deo (2019) and Ramchand (2019).

5 (7) a. Sam has put the turkey in the oven. RESULTATIVE Target state: The turkey is in the oven. The event has a corresponding state that holds a → transitory time after.

b. Ian has visited France. EXPERIENTIAL Resultant state: Ian has been to France at least once in the past. The event has a correspond- → ing state that holds forever after. The subject has ‘gained the experience’ of the event.

c. I have lived in Chicago for a year. UNIVERSAL There is a continuous living in Chicago extending from a year before TT/TU to TT/TU. →

These three sentences refer to some event happening (or starting) in the past but there is a crucial differ- ence in meaning between them and their equivalents with the simple past provided in (8).

(8) a. Sam put the turkey in the oven. b. Ian visited France. c. I lived in Chicago for a year.

While there is no difference in the truth-conditional content between (7a)–(7b) and (8a)–(8b)—they both entail that some event happened prior to the time of utterance—“they feel very different” (Parsons 1990:229). As Portner (2003a:1224) puts it: “it is generally assumed that a present perfect sentence says something both about the past, and about the present.” More precisely, at least for English, “on the one hand, the evidence from the tense morphology indicates that a present state is being asserted; on the other, there is an entailment that a certain event occurred prior to that” (Ramchand 2019:3). While En- glish morphology perhaps makes this association between past event and present state more intuitive, the perfect aspect is a purely semantic category that may or may not have a morphological exponent depending on the language. However, even in those cases where there is no morphological perfect, the perfect aspect is still a relevant category on the semantic level that can be expressed by speakers and retrieved by hearers. As such, in many languages, one form can have two aspectual functions. For in- stance, the perfective morphology is used in many languages to express perfect aspect, and in this case, the same form fulfills both functions (cf. §2.1.2 below for a more detailed discussion of this).

In English, the perfect has three readings. The resultative reading (7a) applies to predicates for which there is an event associated with a result state (mainly change of state predicates) and entails that this state holds at a particular reference time. The experiential reading found in (7b) applies to predicates that do not necessarily have a particular result state, but the result of the event holds forever after its occurrence. Finally, the universal reading (7c)—a highly marked use—“describes a situation that started in the past but continues in the present” (Klein 1994:112). This last reading will not be taken into account in this paper since it is a rare use of the perfect morphology cross-linguistically and it can be ignored here because BH uses the imperfective morphology for this type of reading. In BH, both of the resultative and experiential readings can be expressed by the perfective stem and a full description of this is provided in §2.2, which focuses on the BH verbal system.

6 Furthermore, it is generally accepted in the literature that the perfect aspect describes eventualities that are relevant at speech time. This is not only due to the result state holding at TU, but also to other factors. In fact, the experiential perfect “indicates that a given situation has held at least once during some time in the past leading up to the present” (Comrie 1976:59), and thus does not have a specific result state holding at TU in the same way that the resultative perfect would. Yet, a native English speaker would notice the difference between (7b) and its simple past counterpart (??), especially in certain discourse situations. In the case of the experiential then, the pragmatic component of “current relevance” is im- portant, but not sufficient because of its non-constrained nature.5

The problem with the Kleinian representation sketched above for the perfect aspect (fig. 4 and 5) is that it does not capture the relationship between the past event and the result state holding at reference time or the relevance of the event at TU. While it posits an important relationship between TT and TSit that sets it apart from a perfective, the analysis does not explain in a satisfying way how this relationship works in order to get the present or “current relevance” component added by the perfect. It also makes it impossible to derive the relationship between the perfect and the perfective that is described below in §2.1.2 and which beyond being crucial for the argument of this paper, has a fair amount of evidence that should be captured by the way the perfective and the perfect are represented in the framework.

This problem has been tackled in various ways in order to give a complete analysis of the perfect capable of deriving all of its readings. The most widely accepted analysis is the “Extended Now” (XN) theory in- troduced by McCoard (1978). The main claim of the XN theory is that “the perfect introduces an interval that extends back from the reference time, and affirms that the untensed proposition that it takes in its scope is true at that interval” (Bhatt and Pancheva 2005). The XN interval is different from TT and TSit (cf. fig. 6).

Figure 6: The Extended Now Interval

Event [TSit] Now [TT]

TU (time) [XN]

The XN theory can handle the “relevance” component of the perfect by virtue of introducing this time interval whose right boundary is set up by TT, and whose left boundary may or may not be overtly spec- ified. However, it is generally argued that the left boundary cannot be too far back in time (the so-called “lifetime effects”): If the event happened too long ago, the perfect is illicit, as shown by the oddity of the famous Gutenberg example in (9).

(9) ?? Gutenberg has discovered the art of printing. (Portner 2003b:464)

5. “The notion is of a pragmatic nature, and until recently, remained very general; criticisms include the fact that other tenses also describe situations that have continuing relevance, and thus the principle of relevance fails to establish a systematic contrast between S[imple] P[ast] and P[resent] P[erfect]” (Ritz 2011:887).

7 While the XN theory tackles the current relevance issue by focusing on relationships between tempo- ral intervals, Portner (2003b:499–501) proposes that there is a pragmatic component in the use of the perfect: Provided a common ground between participants in a discourse situation, a perfect sentence carries the presupposition that it provides a complete or a partial answer to a discourse topic at the time of utterance. He proposes the definition in (10).

(10)P ORTNER’S DEFINITION OF THE PERFECT: A sentence S of the form PERFECT(φ) presupposes: q[ANS(q) & P(p,q)],6 ∃ where ANS is true of any proposition which is a complete or partial answer to the discourse topic at the time S is uttered.

Here, p is the proposition expressed by φ, and P(p,q) means that “the proposition p, given some conver- sational background, is necessarily7 an answer to a question [(q)] that is part of the current conversation” (Ritz 2011:894).

Portner’s analysis shows that the difference between using the perfect vs. the simple past in an English sentence is that “while the past may indicate a current result or state of relevance to the discourse topic, it does not linguistically presuppose that it does so”(Portner 2003b:502). This pragmatic account properly derives the meaning associated with the PERFECT aspect, while allowing those meanings to be available for the perfective/simple past, a crucial point developed in the following section (§2.1.2).

The theories of the perfect described here will all be included in my analysis of hinneh¯ in §4. While the temporal semantics are decisive in deriving the perfect readings properly, a Gricean approach taking into account pragmatic components will also play a key role in providing a principled account of hinneh¯ ’s interaction with the perfective.

2.1.2 The Perfective and the Perfect

The perfective and the perfect aspects, while having different denotations according to the framework laid out above, do have a few things in common. First, on empirical grounds, languages without dedi- cated perfect morphology tend to express the experiential and resultative readings of that category with their perfective stem (Comrie 1976:58). The perfect readings are derived either from context, or because of the use of an item such as a particle (which may or may not be optional). To illustrate this, consider the Najdi Arabic data in (11).

(11)P ERFECTIVEAND PERFECTIN NAJDI ARABIC (Ingham 1994:103-4):

a. yomin¯ nzalat il-ard. ma¯ baQad xilgat when descend.PFV.3FSG DEF-earth NEG yet create.PASS.PFV.3FSG When it (the camel) came down to the earth, it had not yet been created.

6. There is a discourse topic q with an answer (ANS) to it and a proposition p which relates to q via the operator P. 7. P is similar to an epistemic operator, introducing “a “modal presupposition” of a relation of epistemic necessity between the general question that is debated in the discourse (i.e., the topic), and its answer” (Ritz 2011:894).

8 b. hu gidˇ ricib he PERF ride.PFV.3MSG He has ridden (before).

Najdi, in a similar way to other dialects of Arabic as well as other languages such as Chinese, has a general perfective stem as in nzalat in (11a). This stem can have a contextually derived perfect reading like xilgat does in (11a), or an obligatory perfect reading via the use of the particle gidˇ like in (11b). In this sense, gidˇ composes with the perfective and reduces the set of readings available to it to the perfect. In other words, while the bare morphological perfective can have a perfect reading derived via implicature, the use of gidˇ + perfective entails that the perfect is being expressed.

This typological state of affairs concerning the relationship between the perfective and the perfect has historical and theoretical underpinnings, as shown by Condoravdi and Deo’s (2014) analysis of the com- mon grammaticalization path from resultative to perfect to perfective in Indo-Aryan. As a matter of fact, Hebrew’s perfective stem historically comes from the Proto-Semitic stative resultative category that be- came a full fledged perfective in West Semitic while remaining stative in East Semitic (Akkadian paris). This grammaticalization path leads to perfective stems that have a variety of readings, among them the readings of the perfect going back to a more restricted denotation of the stem. Basically, as the stem’s semantic range becomes larger, it acquires more readings while keeping the older ones available. As such, its denotation weakens at every stage to include more readings without ever losing its original core meaning. This is the historical development that BH’s perfective stem went through, and at the syn- chronic level, this stem has many readings available to it (all detailed in §2.2), the perfect being one of them: Readings of the perfect are thus a subset of the readings of the perfective. This means that as de- scribed above, there is an asymmetric entailment relationship between the two, such that the perfect en- tails the perfective but not the other way around. Subsequently, for languages without dedicated perfect morphology, it is possible to derive the perfect reading from the perfective morphology via implicature.

The generalization made here about these two aspects is very important because I argue that BH hinneh¯ reduces the readings available to the perfective in the same way that dedicated particles in other lan- guages do, so it is crucial that BH displays these readings independently. Before going into the particular manifestation of this in BH, I would like to address one more semantic category: Lexical aspect.

2.1.3 Lexical Aspect

Lexical aspect is a is “a semantic category that concerns properties of eventualities expressed by verbs [...]. The properties in question have to do with the presence of some end, limit, or boundary in the lexical structure of certain classes of verbs and its lack in others” (Filip 2012:722). Concretely, it is the typical Vendlerian (Vendler 1957) distinction between four types of predicates: States, activities, accom- plishments and achievements. In this paper, lexical aspect is important to consider in so far as different verb types have different readings depending on what grammatical aspect they combine with. The most important difference here is the one between dynamic and stative predicates because of the presence of stative verbs in the perfective in the scope of hinneh¯ . Since I argue that hinneh¯ is interacting with the

9 perfective verb following it, I would like to make clear all the possible configurations of the perfective, not just its obvious meaning with dynamic predicates described above.

According to Comrie (1976:19), “in many languages that have a distinction between perfective and im- perfective forms, the perfective of [...] some stative verbs can [...] be used to indicate the beginning of a situation.” In fact, in the languages that he surveyed (Ancient Greek, Spanish, Mandarin), the com- bination of perfective morphology and stative predicates can give rise to ingressive readings, but is not limited to them. For instance, past state readings are also attested for these languages: “the form de- scribing the state here refers not only to the state, but also its inception and termination” (ibid.:50). As for other languages, he notes that for many of them “stative verbs do not have forms with perfective meaning, while in many other languages, this applies to a large number of stative verbs” (ibid.:50).

There seems to be considerable cross-linguistic variation as to the meaning of stative predicates with perfectives. In fact, despite the wealth of available literature on grammatical and lexical aspect, there is to my knowledge no typological description of perfectivity when combined with stativity. In fact, very few studies address the problem, and the ones that do do not provide clear answers. For this reason, in the following section (§2.2), after having laid out the relevant components of the BH tense/aspect system, I go over the readings available to BH stative predicates with the perfective, as a language specific survey.

2.2 Tense and Aspect in the Hebrew Bible

Since this paper is concerned with the interaction of hinneh¯ with the verbal forms of BH, it is important to lay out my assumptions about the BH verbal system. This corner of the Hebrew language is probably the one that has received most attention from scholars, as seen from the heated debates on the topic since the beginnings of Western scholarship on Hebrew until today. Before turning to the theoretical aspect, the verbal forms of BH are laid out in table 2.

FORM NAME FUNCTION qat¯ al¯ Suffix Conjugation Perfective yiqtol¯ Prefix Conjugation Imperfective w@qat¯ al¯ w-retentive Suffix Conjugation Imperfective wayyiqtol¯ w-retentive Prefix Conjugation Perfective/Simple Past qot¯ el¯ Active Participle Verbal Adjective q@tol¯ Infinitive Verbal noun q@tol¯ Imperative

Table 2: BH Verbal Forms

The main question that has occupied researchers is whether BH has a tense-based system (Joosten 2012) or an aspect-based system (Pardee 2011). The most complete and nuanced study is provided by Cook (2012). The difference between the two theories is primarily centered around the role of the active par- ticiple (qot¯ el¯ ) in the language: Joosten (2012) argues that the present participle expresses the present tense, while the suffix conjugation (qatal¯ ) is a simple past and the prefix conjugation (yiqtol¯ ) a future. While this is certainly true of Modern Hebrew, and even of Mishnaic Hebrew for the role of the partici-

10 ple at least, the verbal system of BH seems to be different. On the other hand, the aspectual theory defends that the suffix conjugation and the prefix conjugation stand in a perfective:imperfective oppo- sition, whereas the active participle is a verbal noun “whose function is to express acts non-aspectually by describing the actor adjectivally” (Pardee 2011:290). The role of the active participle will not really be explored here but I assume it is not a fully fledged tensed category and will be considered as a non-finite form in this paper.

Furthermore, the w-retentive forms—sometimes referred to as “converted forms”—have also been sub- ject to much debate, but they will not be of any concern in this paper. In fact, the present study is ex- clusively concerned with finite verbal forms occurring after hinneh¯ , and w-retentive verbs only appear clause-initially (ibid.:290), that is to say that they could not possibly be preceded by hinneh¯ .

For the purposes of this study, I would like to focus on the suffix conjugation and give a detailed de- scription of it. As shown in §2.1.2, there is a relationship between the perfective and the perfect, both on theoretical and empirical grounds. The perfective has actually a wider array of readings than just the ones discussed in §2.1.2. Here, I would like to look exclusively at BH’s perfective and list its different uses.

In his study of tense and aspect in BH, Cook (2012) argues that the suffix conjugation in BH is a typical perfective stem, based on the readings available to it, all provided in (12).

(12)T HEREADINGSOFTHE BH PERFECTIVE: a. Gnomic:8. (Is. 1:3) י³ד¯ע שׁוֹר קֹנ¦הוּ ו®חֲמוֹר אֵבוּס בְּעָלָיו י¢שׂר´אֵל ל¸א י³ד¯ע עַמִּי ל¸א הִתְבּוֹNÉ! yada¯ Q šor¯ qon¯ e-hu¯ wa-h˘amor¯ Peb¯ us b@Qal-¯ aw¯ yi´sra¯Pel¯ lo¯Q know.PFV.3MSG ox master-3MSG and-donkey manger owner-3MSG Israel NEG yada¯ Q Qamm-i lo¯Q hitbon¯ an¯ know.PFV.3MSG people-1SG NEG understand.PFV.3MSG The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand. b. Past Perfective: (sequential narration) (Gen. 1:1-5) בְּר§אשׁ¤ית בָּר´א אֱל·הִיM אֵת הַשׁµמַי¢M וžאֵת הָאָר»Z![...] וžלַחֹשׁ¬› קָר´א לָיžלָה! b@reš¯ ¯ıt bar¯ a¯P Pel¯ oh¯ ¯ım Pet¯ haš-šamayim w@-Pet¯ ha-¯ Pres¯. ... at.beginning create.PFV.3MSG god DOM DEF-skies and-DOM DEF-land ... w@-lah. ošek¯ qar¯ a¯P layl¯ ah¯ and-darkness call.PFV.3MSG night In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth [...] and the darkness he called night. c. Past Perfect: (in embedded clauses) (Gen. 31:32) וžל¸אÊי³ד¯ע י³עֲקֹב כִּי ר´חֵל גּɞבָתMַ! w@-lo¯P yada¯ Q yaQ˘aqob¯ k¯ı rah¯ . el¯ g@nab¯ at¯ -am and-NEG know.PFV.3MSG Jacob that Rachel steal.PFV.3FSG-3MPL

8. “Gnomic forms represent a generic fact, a general truth, or a habitual action, and may be found with a variety of different tenses and aspects, in proverbs such as A stitch in time saves nine” (Hewson 2013)

11 Jacob did not know that Rachel had stolen them. (Waltke and O’Connor 1990:490) d. Present Perfect:9 (Ex. 9:27) ו®יּ¸אמֶר אֲלֵהMֶ חָטָאתִי הַפָּעMַ! wayyo¯Pmer¯ P˘ale-hem¯ h. at¯.at¯ ¯ı ha-p¯ a¯Qam say.PFV.3MSG to-them sin.PFV.1SG DEF-time He said to them: “This time, I have sinned”. (van der Merwe et al. 2017:157) e. Future Perfect:10 (Gen. 24:33) ל¸א אֹכַל עַד אÊMִדּ£בַּרŸתִּי דּŸבָר´י! lo¯P Pok¯ al Qad Pim dibbart¯ı d@bar¯ ay¯ NEG eat.IPFV.1SG until when speak.PFV.1SG my_things I will not eat until I have told my errand. (ibid.) f. Performative: (Kgs 9:3 2) כֹּהÊאָמַר יžהו³ה מְשׁ°חְתִּיœ לְמֶלֶ› אֶלÊי¢שׂר´אֶל! ko-¯ Pamar¯ yhwh m@šah. -t¯ı-ka¯ l@-melek Pel-yi´sra¯Pel¯ thus-say.PFV.3MSG Lord anoint.PFV-1SG-2MSG to-king to-Israel. Thus speaks the lord: I [hereby] anoint you king over Israel. (Hasselbach 2015:460) g. Counterfactual: (Judg. 13:23) לוּ חָפZֶ יžהו³ה לַהֲמִיתֵנוּ ל¸אÊלָקַח מִיּ³ד§נוּ עֹלָה! lu h. a¯p¯es¯. YHWH lah˘am¯ıt-enu¯ lo¯P laqah¯ . miy-yad-¯ enu¯ Qol¯ ah¯ if intend.PFV-3MSG Lord kill.INF-1PL NEG take.PFV-3MSG from-hand-1PL sacrifice If the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have accepted from our hands burnt offering (Waltke and O’Connor 1990:494)

As for its combination with stative roots, Cook (2012) argues that in the suffix conjugation, “absent con- textual indicators otherwise, stative verbs are interpreted as present states” (ibid.:198). This claim is sup- ported by a token analysis of a sample of 49 BH stative roots in the suffix conjugation appearing in direct speech, 78% of which have a present state reading while 22% have a past state reading (ibid.:199). While Cook uses these data as an argument for qatal¯ being a perfective, the actual evidence on perfectivity and present state readings is not as “typical” (ibid.:199) as he makes it appear to be. In fact, he cites Bybee et al. (1994:92) who only provide one language that exhibits such patterning. There are empirical reasons to believe that perfective stems do give present state readings when combined with stative roots,11 but to the best of my knowledge, this issue has not been explored in the literature, so it is hard to know how robust it is.

By contrast, Comrie (1976:19-20) points to solid evidence that stative verbs combined with perfective forms “can in fact be used to indicate the beginning of a situation (ingressive meaning)”. This is borne

9. “The qatal¯ often refers to events that happened prior to a point y, and the effects of what happened are still relevant at point y. In direct discourse [...], this use [...] is translated as a present perfect.” (van der Merwe et al. 2017:157) 10. “In a few instances, the point y may be in a future time frame (future perfect)” (ibid.:157) 11. For example, in Tunisian Arabic, in the absence of contextual markers, many perfective stative verbs seem to have present state reading.

12 out by evidence from Ancient Greek, Spanish, and Chinese. That is not to suggest that the present state reading for stative verbs in the perfective is to be ruled out, but it is important to not view it as the archetypal reading for this combination if we do not have a proper typological study on the issue. In fact, on top of the past state readings mentioned by (Cook 2012:198) (see (13a)), BH does have ingressive readings for perfective statives, as in the use of pmlk in (13b), which is very much parallel to the Ancient Greek verb basileúo¯ with the same meaning and readings (Comrie 1976:19).

(13)T HEUSESOF pmlk IN BIBLICAL HEBREW (Waltke and O’Connor 1990:181): (Kgs 2:11 1) מָלַ› דּ´ו¢ד עַלÊי¢שׂר´אֵל אַרŸבָּעMִ שׁɵה! .a malak¯ David Qal-yisra¯Pel Parba¯Q¯ım šan¯ ah¯ be.king.3MSG.PFV David on-Israel fourty year David reigned over Israel forty years. PAST STATE READING (Kgs 8:25 2) בִּשׁ נ®ת שׁ תֵּיÊMעֶשׂר§ה שׁɵה לְיוֹר´M מָלַ› אֲחַזžי³הוּ! .b bi-šnat šteym-¯ Qe´sreh šan¯ ah¯ l@-yor¯ am¯ malak¯ ˘ah. azyahu¯ in-year twelve year to-Yoram be.king.3MSG.PFV Ahaziah In the twelfth year of Joram, Ahaziah became king.INGRESSIVEREADING

p The stative root ydQ also has an ambivalent behavior when combined with the perfective, albeit in a different way: It can have a past state reading as well as a present state reading. These seem to be typically conditioned by contextual evidence (past state reading in past tense narration and present state reading in direct speech).

p (14)T HEUSESOF ydQ IN BIBLICAL HEBREW (Gen. 31:32) וžל¸אÊי³ד¯ע י®עֲקֹב כִּי ר´חֵל גּɞבָתa. !Mַ w@lo¯P yada¯ Q YaQ˘aqob¯ k¯ı Rah¯ . el¯ g@nab¯ at¯ am NEG know.PFV.3MSG Jacob that Rachel steal.PFV.3FSG-3pl Jacob did not know that Rachel had stolen them. PAST STATE READING (Gen. 27:2) וžל¸אÊי³ד¯עתִי יוֹM מוֹתִי! .b lo¯P yada¯ Qt¯ı yom¯ mot-¯ ¯ı NEG know.PFV.1SG day death-1SG I do not know the day of my death. PRESENT STATE READING

p I have not looked at all instances (over 400) of ydQ and therefore do not know if it can have an ingressive reading like pmlk does.

As shown in the examples, there does not seem to be a clear default reading for stative roots in the per- fective, and Cook’s small study can only go so far. In order to actually answer this problem, there needs to be a study that takes into account not only tokens (Cook’s strategy) but also types: Different verbs might show different behaviors depending on their specific meanings, despite all falling in the stative category. Such study is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important to be aware of these facts bout stative predicates since they are treated below when they appear with hinneh¯ (§4.1.4).

13 2.3 Summary

The goal of this section was twofold: Provide the theoretical framework that is at the basis of this study, and give a background on the relevant aspects of Biblical Hebrew that will factor in my analysis. As far as the theoretical framework is concerned, I have laid out the assumptions guiding my analysis and de- scribed the most important theories of the perfect aspect. All these analyses will be used for the account of hinneh¯ with the perfective, as each one of them provides important insights regarding this issue. Hav- ing laid out these two crucial points, we can move on to hinneh¯ proper, by first looking at previous works on the topic and by providing a general discussion of the data that will be analyzed in this paper.

3 Literature Review and Methodology

The goal of this section is to first review the previous proposals on hinneh¯ which are relevant to my own, and to provide the methodology used for data collection and analysis. Combined with the preceding the- oretical section, it will complete the essential preliminary steps leading to the main argument developed in §4.

3.1 The Meanings of Hinneh¯

In the regular dictionary entry of hinneh¯ (Brown et al. 1906 [2012]), hinneh¯ is called a demonstrative particle, “pointing to persons or things” or “introducing clauses involving predication”. The authors dis- tinguish a special meaning for w@hinneh¯ —the particle preceded by a conjunction—as a device used especially “after verbs of seeing or discovering, making the narrative graphic and vivid, and enabling the reader to enter into the surprise or satisfaction of the speaker or actor concerned.”

Following Brown et al. (1906 [2012]), most descriptions of hinneh¯ deal with its appearence after verbs of speech, opposing it to the closely related w@hinneh¯ , which supposedly only appears after verbs of sight, “introducing content clauses which include a circumstancial nuance” (Zewi 1996:37). This limited context in which hinneh¯ appears has made it prone to being treated as closely linked to direct speech: “The particle hinneh¯ usually follows an inflected form of the Biblical Hebrew verb of speech Pamar¯ ; it generally introduces direct speech” (ibid.:27). While it is true that hinneh¯ is found most often in direct speech, it does not follow that its function is to introduce it. This function typically belongs instead to an introductory verb of saying, namely Pamar¯ (Miller-Naudé 2013). The connection between hinneh¯ and direct speech is attributable to its deictic function, which is found more commonly in dialogue than in narration. It is this “core deictic meaning” that Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011) study in depth from a purely cognitive perspective, attributing to it a primary mirative function.12 Mirativity is a highly debated semantic category first introduced by Scott DeLancey (1997) and described as marking “an ut- terance as containing information which is surprising to the speaker” (Hill 2012). While this category is used for a number of languages in the linguistic literature, it has been rejected by some linguists, the

12. “It is evident [...] that hinneh¯ is primarily a lexical marker of mirativity” Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011:81).

14 most important case against it being made by Hill (2012).13 Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011) as- sume it is a valid category and therefore divide the uses of hinneh¯ into three main categories—all related to mirativity—reproduced in (15):

(15)T HEUSESOF hinneh¯ ACCORDINGTO MILLER-NAUDÉANDVANDER MERWE (2011): a. “A speaker uses hinneh¯ to point to x in a speech situation.” (40%) b. “A narrator, less frequently a speaker, points to the cognitive effects of an observation on a character [...] for which he/she was unprepared.” (25%) c. “A speaker or narrator points to a proposition which needs to be related to another proposi- tion.” (26%)14

These three categories subdivide in turn to finer classes, all converging to notions of noteworthiness, newsworthiness, unpreparedness of the character, etc. Moreover, “in each of the three categories [...], hinneh¯ has a deictic function which should be regarded as its semantic core” (ibid.:80). This is arguably true since hinneh¯ is a presentative and the majority of its occurrences are in nominal clauses, where it scopes over noun phrases, pointing to people or things.

While keeping in mind the semantic core pointed out by Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011), I will focus on a more distributional analysis of the particle rather than a cognitive one. While looking at the general context of the story to determine new information and the noteworthiness of such and such event is important to some extent, focusing on the position of hinneh¯ in the clause and the verbal form it co-occurs with might shed light on some of its uses by the authors of the text. Crucially, the treatment of hinneh¯ as some sort of evidential by most authors has prevented us from seeing other ways in which it contributes to the language, and especially the verbal system. In fact, even Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011) recognize that their model could not account for a number of occurrences of hinneh¯ and during my data collection, I have noticed many examples that are very hard to account for in terms of surprise of the speaker or the hearer since the events were already narrated in the previous verses, or simply do not seem important enough to trigger any reaction from the hearer. This might be due to the fact that hinneh¯ is not exclusively a mirative marker, but rather a device used by the authors to describe events in a particular way: Since BH only has two finite verbal forms, I believe hinneh¯ might have been used to express certain temporal nuances not immediately available to those two forms.

As a matter of fact, Bendavid (1967) argued that the meaning of the verb in BH is not the same with and without hinneh¯ 15 and demonstrated the function of the presentative via a diagram reproduced and translated in fig. 7 for purposes of clarity. His main claim is that hinneh¯ has a special function in the

13. Talking about this debate in detail is beyond the scope of this paper but relevant issues concerning mirativity are briefly discussed below in §5. 14. The percentages add up to 91% because the remaining 9% of the examples either could not be accounted for according to their model or were not taken into account altogether because of text critical considerations in some of the cases, what they consider fixed expressions in other cases, as well as examples where hinneh¯ appears in dream reports. (Bendavid 1967:550) ”אינו דומה משמעו של אותו פעל עM הנה למשמעו בלעדיה!“ .15

15 tense/aspect system of BH, “bringing the past into the present”16 (Bendavid 1967:551), i.e, the so-called “current relevance”, a descriptive term used for PERFECT aspect in the literature (Ritz 2011:passim). He does not use that term exactly, as he writes in Hebrew,17 and his description of the phenomenon does not really integrate the prefix conjugation, but his conception of it clearly shows that hinneh¯ + qatal¯ expresses more recent or relevant past and hinneh¯ + qot¯ el¯ very near future, as he describes in fig. 7.

Figure 7: The role of hinneh¯ according to Bendavid (1967:550)

hinneh!¯

PAST NEARPAST PRESENT NEARFUTURE FUTURE

qatalti¯ hinneh¯ qatalti¯ hinne-n¯ ¯ı qot¯ el¯

hinneh!¯

As such, his schema seeks to express the immediacy given to the stem—be it finite or not—when hinneh¯ is added to it. Furthermore, his observations about hinneh¯ + perfective are very much reminiscent of the Extended Now theory described above, especially his impression that hinneh¯ “defines the border of which I assume refers to it encompassing the reference time: This (תוחמת את גבולו של העבר!) ”the past is exactly what the XN interval is, a time interval extending from the reference time to the past (cf. fig. 6 above). I believe Bendavid’s (1967) intuitions are correct and that they should be argued for in a more systematic way. The kind of representation in fig. 7, while not capturing the whole range of meanings of hinneh¯ , shows its interaction with the BH verbs in a straightforward manner. I think that a more careful approach such as the one I adopt in this paper, with a bigger sample (detailed §3.2) and an appropriate theoretical framework, will be fruitful in demonstrating the role of hinneh¯ more accurately.

3.2 Data and Methodology

I have collected all occurrences of hinneh¯ from Genesis until 2 Kings and tagged the relevant type of entity that it scopes over. I chose such a sample in order to have a consistent corpus genre and period wise: The text that I surveyed is mostly in prose,18 and believed to be part of the same historical period of the language, i.e., Classical BH, as opposed to archaic (e.g., Gen. 49, Ex. 15) and late (e.g., Esther, Chronicles) BH (Hornkhol 2013). Table 319 below summarizes the categories of the tokens that I have

(Bendavid 1967:550) ”היא תוחמת את גבולו של העבר ÊÊ הנה עשיתי עד כאN!“ .16 (ibid.:551) ”מלת הנה מביאה את העבר ומקרבת אותו עד לנקודת ההווה!“ 17. He also writes at a time when tense/aspect theory is at its beginnings, so all of his intuitions are very much correct, albeit not formalized. 18. Some passages in the corpus are in poetry (e.g., the song of the sea) but they are not considered in any case since hinneh¯ does not appear there. These same passages are also believed to be from an older layer of Hebrew. 19. PFV = perfective, IPFV = imperfective, IMP = imperative, INF = infinitive, NP = noun phrase, ADJ = adjective, PP = prepositional phrase, ADV = adverb and AMB = ambiguous. Ambiguous forms are forms that could be either an active participle or a perfective

16 collected, represented by the relevant examples in (16).20

Category PFVIPFVPTCPIMPINFNPADJPPADVAMBTOTAL Tokens 133 9 165 2 5 150 19 16 4 31 534

Table 3: Data count

As seen in the table, the majority of occurrences of hinneh¯ precede noun phrases.21 This is precisely its main function, a deictic pointing out to things or people, as in (16a). It also scopes over adjectives (16b), prepositional phrases (16c), infinitives (16e), and imperfective (16f) and perfective (16g) verbs.

(16)T HE DIFFERENT CONTEXTS OF THE USAGE OF HINNEH¯ : a. hinneh¯ + noun phrase: (Kgs 1:23 1) ו®יּ®גּ¢ידוּ לַמָּלֶ› לֵאמֹר הִנּ¦ה ÉתNָ הַנּ³בִיא! wayyag¯ıdu¯ lam-malek¯ lePmor¯ hinneh¯ nat¯ an¯ han-nab¯ıP tell.3PL.PFV PREP.DEF-king PREP-say.INF HINNEH Nathan DEF-prophet And they told the king: Here is Nathan the prophet. (ex. from van der Merwe 2006:2) b. hinneh¯ + adjective: (Gen 1:31) ו®יּ®רŸא אֱל·הִיM אֶתÊכָּלÊאֲשׁ¬ר עָשׂµה וžהִנּ¦הÊטוֹב מְאֹד! wayyarP Pel˘ oh¯ ¯ım Pet-kol-P˘ašer Qa´s¯ ah¯ w@-hinneh¯ .tob¯ m@Pod¯ see.PFV.3MSG God DOM-all-which do.PFV.3MSG and-HINNEH good very And God saw all what he had done and it was good. c. hinneh¯ + prepositional phrase: ו®יּ¸אמְרוּ אֵלָיו אַיּ¦ה שׂµר´ה אִשׁתֶœ ו®יּ¸אמֶר הִנּ¦ה בָאֹהֶל! wayyo¯Pmru¯ Pel-¯ aw¯ Payeh¯ ´sar¯ ah¯ Pišt-eka¯ wayyo¯Pmer hinneh¯ ba-¯ Pohel¯ say.PFV.3PL to-him where Sarah wife-2MSG say.PFV.3MSG HINNEH in.DEF-tent They said to him: “Where is Sarah your wife?” and he said: “In the tent”. d. hinneh¯ + present participle: (Sam 19:9 2) הִנּ¦ה הַמֶּלKֶ יוֹש¨ב בַּš°עַר! hinneh¯ ham-melek yoš¯ eb¯ ba´s-´sa¯ Qar HINNEH DEF-king sit.PTCP.MSG in.DEF-gate Behold, the king is sitting in the gate. verb such as ba¯P, stative roots (e.g., pmlP), etc.They were not considered in the analysis in order not to make a decision on their grammatical from. 20. Throughout the remainder of this paper, I deliberately gloss hinneh¯ as HINNEH, in order not to give it any particular mean- ing and look at the data without assumptions on its category beyond it being a deictic element. As for its translation, it depends on the context. I disprefer the common behold, except when it is justified. Sometimes a word such as look is a good translation, sometimes hinneh¯ is better left untranslated. This is especially the case for hinneh¯ combined with the perfective, where I would argue that the best rendering of the presentative is in the translation of the verbal form with a perfect. 21. The organization of the data reflects a difference between purely nominal sentences and sentences containing an active participle, despite the latter being a nominal category because the active participle is a special type of noun and might have a dedicated function in the system.

17 e. hinneh¯ + infinitive: (Judg. 19:9) הִנּ¦ה חֲנוֹת הַיּוֹM לNִ פֹּה! hinneh¯ h. ˘anot¯ hay-yom¯ l¯ın poh¯ HINNEH draw.INF DEF-day sleep.IMP here The day draws to its decline, sleep here. f. hinneh¯ + imperfective: (Gen. 27:39) ו®יּ®עNַ י¢צחָק אָבִיו ו®יּ¸אמֶר אֵלָיו הִנּ¦ה מִשׁ מַנּ¦י הָאָר»Z י¢הְיªה מוֹשׁµבֶœ! wayyaQan yis.h. aq¯ Pab¯ ¯ıw wayyo¯Pmer Pelaw¯ hinneh¯ mi-šmanney¯ answer.PFV.3MSG Isaac father-3MSG say.PFV.3MSG PREP-3MSG HINNEH PREP-fats ha-¯ Pares¯ . yihyeh moš¯ ab¯ -eka¯ DEF-earth be.IPFV.3MSG dwelling-2MSG Isaac, his father answered him saying: away from the fat of the earth your dwelling will be. g. hinneh¯ + perfective: (Judg. 1:2) ו®יּ¸אמֶר יžהו³ה יžהוּד´ה י®עֲלֶה הִנּ¦ה Éתַתִּי אֶתÊהָאָר»Z בְּי³דוֹ! wayyo¯Pmer¯ yhwh y@hud¯ ah¯ yaQ˘aleh¯ hinneh¯ natatt¯ ¯ı Pet-ha-¯ Pares¯ . say.PFV.3MSG Lord Judah ascend.IPFV.3MSG HINNEH give.PFV.1MSG DOM-DEF-land b@-yad-¯ o¯ in-hand-3MSG And the Lord answered: Judah shall go up, I have given the land into their hands.

As seen in the variety of examples in (16), hinneh¯ scopes over various syntactic categories in the corpus. Most of the attestations have in common that hinneh¯ functions as a deictic element, which is very clear for the nominal sentences. As for the verbal sentences, the presentative also functions as a deictic in a more abstract manner—pointing to the eventuality described by the verb—in a way that can lend itself to a systematic analysis: There is an interaction between hinneh¯ and the verbs it scopes over, and the particle is not gratuitously pointing to the described event, it anchors it in the reference time, giving it a special temporality that is left underspecified in verbal sentences without hinneh¯ . The following section (§4) will make this intuition clearer by focusing exclusively on the use of hinneh¯ in verbal clauses and by providing specific examples and by analyzing them within the theoretical frameworks described in §2.

The methodology used for this purpose consists of determining the precise context of each utterance and figuring out the sequence of events in that context. In other words, I try to discern where the event described by the verb preceded by hinneh¯ is situated relative to the other ones in the story for each data point. After working that out, I obtain the three temporal points (TT, TU and TSit) and situate them relative to each other, which in turn provides the correct reading for the verbal form.

4 Analysis of Hinneh¯ in Verbal Clauses

4.1 Hinneh¯ and the Perfective

There are 133 examples of hinneh¯ scoping over a perfective verb in the corpus. I have examined each one of them and have attempted to determine its reading carefully. Contextual information provided in

18 the verses surrounding each example was crucial for this endeavor.

There are three contexts for the use of hinneh¯ + perfective, the most common one being direct speech where the Topic Time and the Time of Utterance coincide. The construction is also found in past tense narration, that is where TT precedes TU. Finally, there is one example of hinneh¯ + SC where TT follows TU. I will tackle them separately, starting with examples where hinneh¯ + SC is in direct speech, for which I argue that hinneh¯ induces a present perfect interpretation for the perfective verb.

4.1.1 Topic Time Utterance Time ⊃ hinneh¯ + SC in direct speech with TT and TU coinciding is the most common in the sample, with 102 examples. When hinneh¯ is found in this context, Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011:65) claim it is mostly used to “point to an event or state of affairs that is proximate to the time of speaking.” This is true to some extent, and usually the resultative reading of the PERFECT aspect does describe events that are close in time to utterance time since the result state needs to hold at TU, but need not to. In fact, in (17), the event is reported some years after the facts, since Abraham is told about eight children two of which are already parents at the time of utterance. Arguably, Milkah had borne those children a long enough time before TU. Yet the English present perfect is perfectly acceptable as a translation, even preferred to a simple past bore in this context, conveying the meaning of what could be called a long distance resultative. The nature of the verb makes possible that its result state (the children being born) holds a long time after the event and this result state can be invoked in situations such as the one in (17).

(Gen 22:20) ו®יּ¹גּ®ד לְאַבְר´הMָ לֵאמֹר הִנּ¦ה י³לְד´ה מִלְכָּה ג®ÊMהִוא בָּנ¢יM לÉְחוֹר אָחִיœ! (17) wayyuggad l@-Pabrah¯ am¯ le¯Pmor¯ hinneh¯ yald¯ ah¯ milkah¯ gam-hiP ban¯ ¯ım l@-nah¯ . or¯ tell.PASS.PFV.3MSG to-Abraham say.INF HINNEH bear.PFV.3FSG Milcah also 3FSG sons Pah¯ . ¯ı-ka¯ to-Nahor brother-2MSG It was told to Abraham: “Milcah has also borne children to your brother Nahor.” PRESENTPERFECTREADING

The important component of (17) is the effects of the result of the event in the context of the utterance: This scene happens after Abraham almost sacrifices his son Isaac to God, and the latter promises him a fruitful descendance (Gen. 22:17-18). He returns to Beer Sheva (Gen. 22:19) and learns about Milkah— who had only been mentioned once before in the whole book (Gen 11:22)—in this very specific context of the narrative. In Portner’s (2003b) terms, the phrase hinneh¯ yald¯ ah¯ is an answer to the discourse topic at the TU. Example (17) can be contrasted with the use of the unmarked perfective of the same root in the description of the sequence of events in (18).

(Gen 4:18) וžעִיר´ד י³לַד אֶתÊמְחוּי³אֵל וּמְחוּי³אֵל י³לַד אֶתÊמְתוּשׁµאֵל וžמְתוּשׁµאֵל י³לַד אֶתÊלָמֶ›! (18) w@-Q¯ırad¯ yalad¯ Pet-m@h. uy¯ a¯Pel¯ u-m@h. uy¯ a¯Pel¯ yalad¯ Pet-m@tuš¯ a¯Pel and-Irad beget.PFV.3MSG DOM-Mehujael and-Mehujael beget.PFV.3MSG Methusael u-m@tuš¯ a¯Pel yalad¯ Pet-lamek¯ and-Methusael beget.PFV.3MSG Lamech

19 And Irad begat Mehujael, and Mehujael begat Methusael and Metusael begat Lamech. PERFECTIVE READING

While in (18), the unmarked perfective is used repeatedly to advance TT, such that each event happens after the one preceding it and sets a new TT for the one following it, the perfect reading of (17) crucially does the opposite of that, as it gives one prior event whose result is relevant at TU. This is parallel to the difference in English between the two verbs: bore can be used multiple times in sequential narration, but has borne does not advance TT in any way. This behavior predicts that hinneh¯ + SC—just like the English present perfect—should not be found in sequential narration. I will develop more on this with the back-shifting effects in 4.1.2. For now, I would like to provide more examples supporting the analysis of hinneh¯ + SC as having a present perfect reading when TT TU. ⊃

(19)A SAMPLEOFHINNEH¯ + PERFECTIVE (TT TU): ⊃ (Josh 9:13) וžאֵלֶּה נ¸אדוֹת הַיּ®י¢N אֲשׁ¬ר מִלֵּאנוּ חֲד´שׁ¤יM וּžהִנּ¦ה הִתְבַּקַּעוּ! .a w@-Pell¯ eh¯ no¯Pdot¯ hay-yayn P˘ašer mille¯Pnu¯ h. ˘adaš¯ ¯ım w@-hinneh¯ hitbaqqa¯Qu¯ and-these wineskins DEF-wine which fill.PFV.1PL new.PL and-HINNEH burst.PFV.3PL These wineskins were new when we filled them, and they have burst. (Num 24:10) לָקֹב אֹיžבַי קְר´אתִיœ וžהִנּ¦ה בֵּר¯Çתָּ בָר§›! .b laq¯ ob¯ Poy¯ @bay q@ra¯Pt¯ı-ka¯ w@-hinneh¯ berak¯ ta¯ bar¯ ek¯ curse.INF enemies.1SG call.PFV.1SG-2MSG and-HINNEH bless.PFV.2MSG bless.INF I called you to curse my enemies and you have blessed them. (Gen 42:2) ו®יּ¸אמֶר הִנּ¦ה שׁµמַעְתִ כִּי יªשׁÊשׁ¬בֶר בְּמִצְר´י¢c. !M wayyo¯Pmer hinneh¯ šama¯ Qt¯ı k¯ı yeš šeber [email protected]¯ say.PFV.3MSG HINNEH hear.PFV.1SG that there_is grain in-Egypt. He said: I have heard that there is grain in Egypt. (1Sam 16:18) ו®יּ®עNַ אֶחָד מֵהַנּžעָר£יM ו®יּ¸אמֶר הִנּ¦ה ר´אִתִי בּNֵ לְי¢שׁ°י בֵּית הַלַּחמִי יֹד§עַ נ®גּ¦d. !N wayyaQan Peh. ad¯ me-han-n¯ @Qar¯ ¯ım wayyo¯Pmer hinneh¯ ra¯P¯ıt¯ı ben¯ l@-yišay answer.PFV.3MSG one of-DEF-boys say.PFV.3MSG HINNEH see.PFV.1SG son of-Jesse a bet¯ hallah. m¯ı yod¯ e¯ Q naggen¯ Bethlehemite know.PTCP.MSG play.INF One of the young men answered: I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who his skillful in playing.

The examples in (19) all have in common the idea that the predicate following hinneh¯ has a component which is relevant at TT. In fact, in (19a), the speaker is describing the state of the wineskins which were new long before TU—when his journey started—and burst (hitbaqqa¯Qu¯) at some point before TU. How- ever, the result of bursting holds at TU, as the speaker shows the state of the wineskins to his interlocutor. The utterance’s context is the speaker trying to prove how long his journey was to his interlocutor Joshua so that the latter would believe that he was coming from far away. The idea of the result state (the wine- skins being torn) holding at TU is important for Joshua to believe the speaker, and in fact, the predicate

20 have burst entails that they are burst at TU, i.e., the result state of the verb holds at TU. The same analysis goes for (19b), where the result state is the enemies being blessed, which is the case at TU. A sentence with a bare perfective could mean that they are still blessed or that the result no longer holds (they were blessed in the past but they are no longer blessed), but crucially here, they are blessed at TU.

However, there is no decisive need for the event expressed by the verb to be associated with a result state for the perfect interpretation to arise. In fact, (19c) and (19d) both have verbs of perception, which typically do not entail any result state. In this case, the appropriate reading of the perfect would be the experiential one, for which an event happens before TT/TU, but is highly relevant at TT/TU. As a matter of fact, in (19c), the speaker is providing an answer to the discourse topic (cf. (Portner 2003b)): In this particular passage, there is famine around the discourse participants and Jacob knows that there is grain in Egypt, so he tells his sons that he had heard that piece of information, and his hearing is relevant at TU as he asks them to go get the grain. This can be compared to the use of the same verb šama¯ Q without hinneh¯ in (20) where it is clear that the perfective verb advances TT and is part of a sequence of events, despite the importance or relevance of Adam’s hearing the voice of God in that context. The difference between the two examples shows the aspectual nuance brought up by hinneh¯ in (19c).

(Gen 3:10) ו®יּ¸אמֶר אֶתÊקֹלְœ שׁµמַעתִּי בַּגּN³ ו³אִיר´א כּÊִעֵירMֹ אָנֹכִי ו³אֵחָבֵא! (20) wayyo¯Pmer¯ Pet-qol-¯ @ka¯ šama¯ Qt¯ı bag-gan¯ wa¯P¯ıra¯P k¯ı Qer¯ om¯ Pan¯ ok¯ ¯ı say.PFV.3MSG DOM-voice-2MSG hear.PFV.1SG in.DEF-garden fear.PFV.1SG because naked 1SG waPeh¯ . ab¯ e¯P hide.PFV.1SG He said: I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.

As for (19d), it is uttered in a context where Saul asks the people surrounding him to bring him a man who can play the lyre. The answer of this particular discourse participant containing an experiential perfect is highly relevant at TU, since it provides a complete answer to the discourse topic in Portner’s (2003b) terms.

As a starting point, I have analyzed both (19c) and (19d) as containing the experiential reading of the perfect: The predicate has no result state, so the perfect is only used because of the relevance of the event at TU. Another possible way of looking at these examples is to postulate a conversationally implicated result state, as proposed by Nishiyama and Koenig (2010). These two authors suggest that the perfect aspect introduces an eventuality occurring before TT, and a state which overlaps TT and “whose category is semantically a free variable X” (ibid.:619). In other words, in the absence of a result state entailed by the verb, the hearer can infer what kind of state could be implicated by the speaker’s use of the perfect. Of course, this state must be related to the event: Taking the author’s example (p.623), if somebody utters the sentence “Ken has lived in London,” a possible result state that can be inferred is that Ken knows good restaurants in London, but not that Susan is married, since the latter is completely unrelated to the utterance. So, following their analysis, (19c) and (19d) would not be experiential perfects, but resultative perfects that necessitate pragmatic inferences on the part of the hearer.22 The way these inferences are

22. Nishiyama and Koenig (2010:623) consider experiential readings of the perfect as obtaining when X is not a possible result

21 put forth and derived are through the I-principle, which “consists of a speaker’s maxim of MINIMIZATION and a hearer’s pragmatic enrichment as its corollary” (Nishiyama and Koenig 2010:622). Basically, the speaker “chooses the less informative utterance when a more informative one is available” and the hearer “enriches the less informative utterance and finds the most specific interpretation he thinks the hearer intended” (ibid.:622). We can apply these insights to (19c) and (19d) and say that in both instances, the speaker is trying to convey his knowledge about the discourse topic: In (19c), Jacob’s goal is to tell his sons that he knows that there is grain in Egypt, and this is the implicated result state by the use of hinneh¯ šama¯ Qt¯ı. In (19d), the young man is trying to tell Saul that he knows somebody who fits the description he provided, by saying that he had seen that person. All of the examples where hinneh¯ is followed by pšmQ ‘to hear’23 or prPh ‘to see’,24 there is an implicated result state that the hearer can infer.

The idea of implicated result states is not specific to the verbs of perception: Consider the examples in (21).

(21) HINNEH¯ + PERFECTIVE WITH IMPLICATED RESULT STATES: (2Kgs 4:13) הִנּ¦ה חָר¯דŸתְּ אֵלֵינוּ אֶתÊכָּלÊהַחֲר´ד´ה הַזּ¸את מֶה לַעֲשׂוֹת לָ›! .a hinneh¯ h. aradt¯ Pel¯ ey-nu¯ Pet kol ha-h. ˘arad¯ ah¯ haz-zot¯ meh laQa´sot¯ la-k¯ HINNEH tremble.PFV.2FSG to-1PL DOM all DEF-trembling DEF-this what do.INF. to-2FSG You have taken all this trouble for us, what is to be done for you? (1Sam 26:21) שׁוּב בְּנ¢יÊד´ו¢ד כִּי ל¸אÊאָר¯ע לְœ עוֹד! [...] הִנּ¦ה הִסְכָּלְתִּי! .b šub¯ b@n¯ı dawid¯ k¯ı lo¯P Para¯ Q l@-ka¯ Qod¯ [...] hinneh¯ return.IMP.2MSG son.1SG David for NEG do_evil.IPFV.1SG to-2SG again [...] HINNEH hiskalt¯ı be_foolish.PFV.1SG Return, my son David, for I will no more do you harm [...] I have acted foolishly. (2Sam 24:17) ו®יּ¸אמֶר דּ´ו¢ד אֶלÊיžהו³ה בִראֹתוֹ אֶתÊהַמַּלְאָ› הַמַּכֶּה בָעMָ ו®יּ¸אמֶר הִנּ¦ה אָנֹכִי הָטָאתִי! .c wayyo¯Pmer dawid Pel-yhwh bi-r@Pot¯ -o¯ Pet-ham-malPak¯ ham-makkeh say.PFV.3.MSG David to-Lord in-see.INF-3MSG DOM-DEF-messenger DEF-smite.PTCP-MSG ba-¯ Qam¯ wayyo¯Pmer hinneh¯ Pan¯ ok¯ ¯ı h. at¯.at¯ ¯ı in.DEF-people say.PFV.3.MSG HINNEH 1SG sin.PFV.1.SG David spoke to the Lord upon seeing the messenger smiting the people and said: “I have sinned.”

In (21a), the implicated result is that the speaker owes the hearer, and is clearly mentioned in the second part of the utterance, where he asks her what he can do for her. In (21b), Saul admits his foolishness in a dialogue where he tries to convince David that he would not hurt him anymore. In a sense, the implicated result here is that he recognizes his mistakes and is aware of their consequences at TU. In (21c), David sees his people being destroyed because of his own mistakes: The result state of his sinning state but a cause of the event expressed by the perfect or when the event expressed by the perfect is evidence for X. 23. Gen 27:6, 1Kgs 20:31 and 2Kgs 19:11. The other instances of pšmQ in the sample are used in the meaning of ‘obey’. 24. 1Sam 18:10, 1Sam 18:11, and 1Sam 24:11 which is analyzed below.

22 is the messenger smiting the people, which is easily inferred from the context, both for the interlocutor and the reader.

Whether the predicate used in the construction hinneh¯ + SC belongs to the category change of state and has an entailed result or whether it lacks that feature and necessitates further pragmatic inferences for the result state to be derived, the general meaning conveyed by the use of hinneh¯ with the perfective is the same. The perfective verbs preceded by hinneh¯ are providing another type of information that their bare counterparts may also provide but need not: While the perfect reading can be derived in specific contexts by implicature from the bare perfective as shown in (12d) on p. 12 above, the presence of hinneh¯ makes that reading entailed. The presentative reduces the available readings of the perfective enumer- ated in (12) to the highly specific perfect, and does so by anchoring the past perfective verb in the time of utterance: It takes the perfective predicate and signals to the hearer/reader that that predicate has some result that is relevant at TU. As such, hinneh¯ is a strategy for expressing a meaning that is otherwise un- derspecified in the bare perfective, therefore making that meaning easier to retrieve by the hearer, who can draw certain inferences from the speaker’s use of hinneh¯ before the perfective. This use is closely linked to its core deictic meaning, but in this case, instead of pointing out to objects, the presentative is pointing out to the relationship between the discourse topic and the utterance.

So far, I have treated hinneh¯ + SC when TT TU in neutral contexts, i.e, when it occurs in an utterance ⊃ that does not contain any indicators giving additional information about TT. In the rest of this section, I will first talk about the use of the construction with temporal adverbials which restrict TT, then tackle a special set of data found exclusively in the book of Leviticus.

Temporal adverbials

In the sample, hinneh¯ + SC also co-occurs with temporal adverbials locating TT at TU, such as Qattah¯ ‘now’. However, hinneh¯ + SC is never found with past temporal adverbials like t@mol¯ ‘yesterday’ or any other restrictors that would provide a clear TT TU for the verb. This distribution, while possibly inci- ≺ dental considering the limitedness of the corpus, provides an additional argument for my analysis. In fact, if hinneh¯ is merely pointing to the cognitive effects of an event, it is predicted that it can point to events that happened at any point before speech time and the speaker could give information about the time of their instantiation. That is, there are multiple possible scenarios where a sentence such as “Behold, I did x two days ago/yesterday/last year” could be uttered, for example to point out to the “note- worthiness” or “newsworthiness” of the event to use Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe’s (2011) terms. The fact that this is never the case in the sample with perfective verbs is noteworthy, and reminiscent of the restriction on temporal adverbials with the English present perfect.

In English, the phenomenon is called “the present perfect puzzle” and refers to the fact that past time adverbials cannot co-occur with a present perfect. As shown in (22), a sentence with a perfect verb can stand on its own (22a) or contain a present referring adverbial (22c). However, any adverbial that would give the event a specific past TT makes the sentence ungrammatical (22b).

23 (22)I LLUSTRATION OF THE PRESENT PERFECT PUZZLE: a. I have been to Paris. b. *I have been to Paris last year. c. So far, I have only been to Paris once.

This is accounted for by the Extended Now Theory in the following way: In a present perfect sentence, TT TU, so TT is in the present. As such, it is only modifiable by present time adverbials. The XN interval ⊃ can only be modified by present time adverbials as well since it includes TT, which is in the present. Thus, event time modification is impossible (Bhatt and Pancheva 2005:8). These interactions are represented in fig. 8.

Figure 8: Representation of the Present Perfect Puzzle (modified from Bhatt and Pancheva (2005:8)

*Last year Be to Paris [TSit] Now [TT]

[XN] TU (time) *Last year

Returning to BH, the examples containing hinneh¯ + SC with present referring temporal adverbials are provided in (23).

(23) HINNEH¯ + PERFECTIVEANDTEMPORALADVERBIALS (Gen 27:36) אֶתÊבְּכֹר´תִי לָקָח וžהִנּ¦ה עַתָּה לָקַח בִּרÈתִי! .a Qet-b@kor¯ at-¯ ¯ı laq¯ ah¯ . w@-hinneh¯ Qattah¯ laqah¯ . birkat-¯ ¯ı DOM-birthright-1SG take.PFV.3MSG and-HINNEH now take.PFV.3MSG blessing-1SG He took away my birthright, and now he has taken away my blessing. (Ex 3:9) וžעַתָּה הִנּ¦ה צַעֲקַת בְּנ¦יÊי¢שׂ ר´אֵל בָּאָה אֵלָי! .b w@-Qattah¯ hinneh¯ s.aQ˘aqat b@ney-Yi´sr¯ a¯Pel¯ ba¯Pa¯ Pel-¯ ay¯ and-now HINNEH cry sons-Israel come.PVF.3FSG to-me. And now the cry of the people of Israel has come to me. (2Kgs 5:22) הִנּ¦ה עַתָּה זªה בָּאוּ אֵלַי שׁ נ¦יÊנžעָר£יc. !M hinneh¯ Qattah¯ zeh ba¯Pu¯ Pel-ay¯ š@ney n@Qar¯ ¯ım HINNEH now this come.PFV.3PL to-1SG two young_men Two young men have just now come to me. (Ex 7:16) יžהו³ה אֱל·הֵי הָעִבְר£יM שׁ לָחַנ¢י אֵלֶיœ לֵאמֹר שׁ°לַּח אֶתÊעַמִּי וžי®עַבְדºנ¢י בַּמִּדŸבָּר וžהִנּ¦ה ל¸אÊשׁµמַעְתָּה עַדÊכֹּה! .d yhwh Peloh¯ ey¯ ha-¯ Qibr¯ım š@lah¯ . an¯ı Pel-eyk¯ a¯ le¯Pmor¯ šallah. Lord god DEF-Hebrews send.PFV.3MSG.1SG to-you saying send.PFV.3MSG Pet-Qamm-¯ı w@yaQabdun¯ ¯ı bam-midbar¯ w@-hinneh¯ lo¯P šama¯ Qta¯ DOM-people-1SG serve.JUSS.3MPL.1SG in.DEF-wilderness and-HINNEH NEG hear.PFV.2MSG Qad-koh¯ until-thus

24 The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you saying, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness,” but so far, you have not obeyed.

In (23a), there is a clear distinction between two events: One that happens in a relatively remote past— Jacob taking away Esau’s birthright (Gen 25:29–34)—and one that happens right before the utterance and is the relevant event during this specific dialogue between Esau and his father. Esau is showing that Jacob cheated him twice, taking his birthright when they were younger, and more importantly, at that point in the story, he had just taken away his blessing. The event that happened further in the past is reported with the bare perfective whereas the event whose result still holds at TU is reported with hinneh¯ before the perfective, in addition to having a present time adverbial for TT. Following our framework, this can be represented as in fig. 9.

Figure 9: Representation of Gen 27:36

Qattah¯ [TT]

TU (time) J. take away blessing [TSit]

(23b) and (23c) behave in a very similar manner, overtly stating TT at TU. As for (23d), Qad-koh¯ functions exactly like the XN interval. The right boundary is TU and is clearly delimited by the adverb, whereas the left boundary is derivable from the context: It is since the speaker has been sent by God. In fact, “until now” can be considered as a paraphrase of extended now.

These examples, as well as the fact that there is no cooccurrence of hinneh¯ + SC with past time adverbials constitute another piece of evidence for my claim that the construction is consistently used as a strategy to express perfect aspect.

A note on Leviticus 12–14

There are 16 examples of hinneh¯ + SC in the book of Leviticus,25 which pertains to the particular genre of medical texts, a genre in which the stipulations typically show a protasis-apodosis structure (Pardee, personal communication, Feb. 5, 2020). In the portion of Leviticus we are considering here, there is a sort of a catalog of cases that involve impurity with relation to leprosy, and the way to handle each one of them. Each case begins with a true conditional sentence starting with the Hebrew conditional marker P¯ım, provides one possible scenario (e.g., “If the disease breaks out all over the skin...” (Lev. 13:12)), and in turn all of its possible developments (the disease covers the whole body (Lev. 13:13), or there is raw flesh on the person (Lev. 13:14), or the raw flesh turns white (Lev. 13:16) etc.). The overarching scenario is introduced by the conditional sentence then the sub-scenarios usually have the structure in (24), which is the relevant one here.

25. Lev. 13:5; 13:6; 13:8; 13:13; 13:17; 13:25; 13:32; 13:34; 13:36; 13:53; 13:55; 13:56; 14:3; 14:39; 14:44 and 14:48. There are eight other examples with hinneh¯ in these two chapters, six of which have a perfective verb a bit further in the clause, and only two that do not have a verb at all.

25 (24) w@ra¯Pah¯ hak-koh¯ en¯ w@-hinneh¯ qat¯ al¯ w@-qat¯ al/t¯ .ah¯ or/t¯ .am¯ e¯P see.IPFV.3MSG DEF-priest and-HINNEH verb.PFV and-verb.PFV/pure/impure And the priest shall examine and hinneh¯ ... and ...

The sentence starting with w@-hinneh¯ is translated in the common English bibles by “if ...” and the fol- lowing sentence always starts by “then,” despite the text not having those elements marked. Moreover, Waltke and O’Connor (1990:677-678) claim that hinneh¯ “can also function as a bridge for a logical con- nection between a preceding clause and the clause it introduces [...] This bridging may involve [...] a condition”. They cite a similar passage from Leviticus as an example of this bridging. This kind of read- ing and the translation with if give the impression that hinneh¯ is some sort of conditional marker with a status comparable to P¯ım. One could wonder then why hinneh¯ is even used in this context, and if we are dealing with a true conditional sentence, why is the preferred conditional marker P¯ım not used. In fact, Joüon (1947:516) claims that hinneh¯ “ne semble pas avoir jamais la valeur propre de si”, but rather, the conditional meaning in Leviticus is derivable from context and hinneh¯ is used because we are dealing with a verb of perception. While I agree with the first part of his argument, I do not think that hinneh¯ is necessarily “amenené par l’idée de voir” (ibid.:516). An alternative translation that does not take hinneh¯ as a conditional marker is proposed by Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011:74):

(Lev. 13:5) וžר´אָהוּ הַכֹּהNֵ בַּיּMֹ הַ™ בִיעִי וžהִנּ¦ה הַנּªג®ע עָמַד בְּעיÉיו ל¸א פָשׂµה הַנּªג®ע בָּעוֹר וžהִסגּ¢ירוֹ הַכֹּהNֵ שׂ¤בְעַת י³מִיM שׂ¨נ¢ית! (25)

w@ra¯Pa-hu¯ hak-koh¯ en¯ bay-y¯ om¯ haš-š@b¯ıQ¯ı w@-hinneh¯ han-negaQ see.IPFV.3MSG-3MSG DEF-priest in.DEF-day DEF-seven and-HINNEH DEF-infection Qamad¯ b@-Qen-¯ aw¯ lo¯P pa´s¯ ah¯ han-negaQ ba-¯ Qor¯ stand.PFV.3MSG in-eyes-3MSG NEG spread.PFV.3MSG DEF-infection in.DEF-skin w@hisg¯ıro hak-koh¯ en¯ šib@Qat yam¯ ¯ım šen¯ ¯ıt confine.IPFV.3MSG DEF-priest seven days second. And the priest shall examine it on the seventh day, and if it turns out the infection has stayed the same in his eyes and has not spread on the skin, then the priest shall confine the person for another seven days.

As seen in the example, they render hinneh¯ by it turns out, and include this verse, as well as all its parallels in the two chapters that are considered here in their second category reproduced above as (15b).26 More precisely, they describe the use of hinneh¯ here as “used to point out how the observers experienced the findings of their observations” (ibid.:73). Since it is especially hard to argue that the narrator in the Leviticus case is “unprepared” (cf.(15b)), they say that hinneh¯ “merely confirms what they expected [...] however [it] is still used to represent the stance of an observer. In terms of our definition of the notion, hinneh¯ still points out to something “newsworthy”” (ibid.:73).27 It is interesting to point out here that

26. “A narrator, less frequently a speaker, points to the cognitive effects of an observation on a character [...] for which he/she was unprepared.” 27. Their definition of “newsworthy” is given on p. 70, fn. 53: “By “newsworthy”, we mean that the information has commu- nicative value for the addressee; it modifies the content or implicatures of statements in the preceding co-text. Information with a communicative value is defined in relevance theoretical circles as information that “yields contextual effects” [...] The

26 these two authors have translated all instances that they cite of hinneh¯ + SC with the English perfect— without pointing to this fact—even where other translations of the Bible use the simple past: They had the intuition that the predicates in these sentences were in the perfect aspect, but did not link that to the presentative scoping over the verb. At any rate, all of the verses of Leviticus 13–14 containing hinneh¯ + SC lend themselves to a perfect interpretation. I include them with the examples where TT TU because ⊃ they seem be rendering a kind of generic present that can be best explained as describing events in a world parallel to the world where the utterance is made, i.e., a possible world. A visual representation of the idea of possible worlds relative to time is reproduced in fig. 10 from Dahl (2010:32).28

w5 w4 w3 w2 w1 Possible Worlds Time

Figure 10: Times and possible worlds as complementary dimensions in semantic space

At any given context of speech in a world w and with a time t, there are multiple possible worlds com- patible with it, and every sentence added to the context shrinks that set of possible worlds by virtue of making the context more specific (Stalnaker 1999:chap.2). When a supposition is made in that same context of speech, the set of possible worlds compatible with it is temporarily shrunk to accommodate that supposition (ibid.:60). Usually, there is a description of what would happen in that world where the supposed statement holds, and then the discourse participants revert back to the initial context of the conversation in the real world.

In the Leviticus case then, the discourse participants are in a context where ritual purity is being ex- plained, and where different types of impurity relating to skin disease are to be dealt with. It is a manual that considers each possible outcome of the disease and the way to handle it. In terms of the represen- tation in fig. 10, every case discussed is one of the worlds (w1,w2...), and each time the speaker sets out the case, then the timeline considered is for that case only, and each time the speaker moves to another case, they move to another w, thus reverting back to the beginning of the timeline for that particular w. For example, each time the speaker in Leviticus says: w@ra¯Pah¯ hak-koh¯ en¯ (the priest examines), he is considering a new case, hence another possible world, and a return to the initial time of utterance, in a parallel world.

Following this description of the structure of Lev. 13–14 then, it is best to represent these examples as (25) is in fig. 11. contextual effects may be something the addressees did not know, something they were unprepared for (e.g., something sur- prising or the denial of an expression) or it may be conforming something they already know.” 28. I alter the figure only by adding labels to the possible worlds near the individual timelines.

27 Figure 11: Representation of Lev. 13:5

The priest examines [TT]

TU (time) infection stay [TSit]

In order to make the perfect readings a bit more salient, let us consider verses 7 and 8 of Lev. 13 together, since they have both the overarching possible scenario of disease (26a) and a possible outcome for it (26b). I offer here a slightly different translation from what is commonly done to show the structure that I assume for this type of verse, i.e., that of a manual going by a case by case basis.

(Lev. 13:7) וžאÊMִפָּשׂ·ה תִפְשׂ¬ה הַמִּסְפַּחַת בָּעוֹר אַחֲר§י הֵר´אֹתוֹ אֶלÊהַכֹּהNֵ לְטָהֳר´תוֹ וžנ¢רŸאָה שׁ¨נ¢ית אֶלÊהַכֹּהa. !Nֵ (26) w@-Pim pa´s¯ oh¯ tip@´seh ham-mispah. at ba-¯ Qor¯ Pah. ˘arey¯ her¯ a¯Pot-¯ o¯ and-if spread.INF spread.IPFV DEF-scab in.DEF-skin after appear.INF-3MSG Pel-hak-k¯ oh¯ en¯ [email protected]˘ar¯ at¯ -o¯ w@nirPah¯ šen¯ ¯ıt Pel-hak-k¯ oh¯ en¯ to-DEF-priest to-purification-3MSG appear.IPFV.3MSG second to-DEF-priest If the scab spreads in the skin after having shown himself to the priest for his purification, he shall appear again before the priest. (Lev. 13:8) וžר´אָה הַכֹּהNֵ וžהִנּ¦ה פָּשׂ תָה הַמִּסְפַּחַת בָּעוֹר וžטִמְאוֹ הַכֹּהNֵ צָר¯עַת הִוא! .b w@ra¯Pah¯ hak-koh¯ en¯ w@-hinneh¯ pa´st¯ ah¯ ham-mispah. at ba-¯ Qor¯ see.IPFV DEF-priest and-HINNEH spread.PFV.3FSG DEF-scab in.DEF-skin [email protected]@P-o¯ hak-koh¯ en¯ s.ara¯ Qat h¯ıP be_unclean.IPFV.3MSG-3MSG DEF-priest leprosy 3FSG The priest looks: the scab has spread in the skin, the priest pronounces him unclean: It is leprosy.

(26a) is a regular conditional sentence presenting the case that is being treated by the speaker, and (26b) elaborates on what the priest does in that particular case. In this case, it is crucial that the priest observes the result of the spreading of the scab: This result must hold at the time of him seeing (TT) for him to pronounce the person unclean, and hinneh¯ preceding the perfective verb in this case is a good strategy to convey that meaning. As it has been shown above, it is used in neutral present tense contexts to reduce the readings of the perfective to a perfect. Here, the context is less neutral but is proof to the variety of places where hinneh¯ + SC can be used for the same function.

There seems to be absolutely no motivation to translate hinneh¯ in these verses of Leviticus as “behold” like the KJV does, and there is no reason to believe that it is a conditional marker, since it would be the only place in the Bible where it would function as such. So far, the least problematic explanation that does not assume any special function for hinneh¯ in Leviticus was that of the presence of hinneh¯ as a deictic accompanying the verbs of perception (Joüon 1947; Zewi 2014). I believe that my analysis of hinneh¯ as a perfect marker not only accounts for its usage elsewhere with the perfective but also in this highly specific context of Leviticus, providing a unified description of the presentative with perfective verbs.

28 In this section, I have shown the different contexts where hinneh¯ + SC appear when TT TU. In all of ⊃ those contexts, hinneh¯ qat¯ al¯ was best translated as an English present perfect. This important general- ization for the present gives rise to one prediction pointed out above (p. 20): hinneh¯ qat¯ al¯ should not be used in sequential narration in order to advance TT, which is a function available to the bare perfective. To show how this prediction tests to the data, we can move on to the contexts where hinneh¯ + SC appears in past tense narration.

4.1.2 Topic Time Utterance Time ≺ There are 30 examples of hinneh¯ + SC where TT precedes TU, and in this context, hinneh¯ is always pre- ceded by the conjunction w@- ‘and.’ There has been a debate on the literature about the meaning of w@hinneh¯ as opposed to that of hinneh¯ , and some authors take the bare presentative and its coordinated counterpart as having two distinct functions, while others treat them as one lexical item that happens to be preceded by a conjunction. For example, Zewi (1996) suggests that they have the same meaning ”only 29אָמַר! but a different distribution. According to her investigation, hinneh¯ “occurs with the verb and w@hinneh¯ “is found to occur with verbs of sight and related contexts only” (ibid.:21). On the other hand, Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011) treat them as one and the same word for which their analysis presumably accounts. In my analysis, the distributional facts picked up by Zewi (1996) only matter in so far as hinneh¯ is not coordinated in direct speech but is coordinated in narration, which makes perfect sense. In other words: “It seems grosso modo, that syntagms headed by w@hinne[h]¯ form (macro)syntactic interdependencies with the surrounding clauses (and accordingly do not occur on their own) while hinne[h]¯ may occur alone” (Cohen 2014:3). Thus, I see no need to mark the distinction be- tween the two variants, since I argue that the pertinent fact about hinneh¯ is its combination with the perfective. My account predicts a similar behavior in these two different contexts, i.e., direct speech and narration for which I provide a representative sample in (27).

(27)A SAMPLEOF hinneh¯ + PERFECTIVE ( TT TU): ≺ (Gen. 8:13) חָרבוּ הַמַּי¢M מֵעַל הָאָר»Z ו®יּ³סַר נֹח אֶתÊמÇִסֵה הַתֵּבָה ו®יּ®רŸא וžהִנּ¦ה חָרŸבוּ פּנ¦י הָאֲד´מָה! .a @ a h. ar bu¯ ham-mayim me-¯ Qal ha¯Pares¯ . wayyasar¯ no¯ h. Pet-mikseh¯ hat-teb¯ ah¯ dry.PFV.3PL DEF-waters from-upon DEF-earth turn.PFV.3MSG Noah DOM-cover DEF-box @ wayyarP w@-hinneh¯ h. ar¯ bu¯ pney ha-¯ Q˘adam¯ ah¯ see.PFV.3MSG and-HINNEH dry.PFV.3PL faces DEF-ground The waters dried from the earth and Noah removed the cover of the ark and looked: the face of the ground had dried up. (Ex. 39:43) ו®יּ®רŸא מֹשׁ¬ה אֶתÊכָּלÊהַמְּלָאÈה וžהִנּ¦ה עָשׂוּ אֹתָהּ כּאֲשׁ¬ר צִוּ³ה יžהו³ה כּNֵ עָשׂוּ! .b wayyarP mošeh¯ Pet–kol ham-m@la¯Pkah¯ w@-hinneh¯ Qa´su¯ Pot¯ ah¯ kaP˘ašer see.PFV.3MSG Moses DOM-all DEF-work and-HINNEH do.PFV.3PL DOM.3FSG as s.iwwah¯ yhwh ken¯ Qa´su¯ command.PFV.3MSG Lord thus do.PFV.3PL Moses saw all the work: they had done it, as the Lord commanded, they had done.

29. Pamar¯ ‘to say’.

29 (Num 17:12) ו®יּ¢קַּח אַהֲרNֹ כּאֲשׁ¬ר דּ£בֶּר מֹשׁ¬ה ו®יּ³ר´Z אֶלÊתּוֹK הַקָּהָל וžהִנּ¦ה הֵחֵל הַנּªגPª בָּעc. !Mָ wayyiqqah¯ . P˘aharon¯ kaP˘ašer dibber¯ mošeh¯ wayyar¯ as¯. Pel-tok¯ take.PFV.3MSG Aaron like say.PFV.3MSG Moses run.PFV.3MSG PREP-midst haq-qah¯ al¯ w@-hinneh¯ heh¯ . el han-negep¯ ba-¯ Qam¯ DEF-congregation and-HINNEH start.PFV.3MSG DEF-plague PREP-people Aaron took as Moses said and ran to the midst of the congregation but The plague had started among the people. (Num 17:23) ו®יžהִי מִמָּחֳר´ת ו®י³ב¸א מֹשׁ¬ה אֶלÊאֹהֶל הָעֵדוּת וžהִנּ¦ה פָּר¯ח מַטֵּהÊאַהֲרNֹ לְבֵית לֵו¢י! .d wayy@hi mimmoh. or˘ at¯ wayyabo¯P mošeh¯ Pel-Pohel¯ ha-¯ Qedut¯ w@-hinneh¯ be.PFV.3MSG next_day come.PFV.3MSG Moses PREP-tent DEF-testimony and-HINNEH parah¯ . mat.eh P˘aharon¯ l@-beyt lew¯ı sprout.PFV.3MSG staff Aaron PREP-house Levi On the next day, Moses went to the tent of the testimony and the staff of Aaron for the house of Levi had [already] sprouted.

I had pointed out above that given my analysis, there is a prediction that hinneh¯ + SC would not be used in order to advance the topic time. This prediction is borne out by the evidence of past tense narration, where most of the events reported by a perfective preceded by hinneh¯ happen to have been instantiated prior to the event expressed before it in the clause. More precisely, in (27a)–(27d) and examples alike, the event expressed by hinneh¯ + SC happens in time before the one described before it in narration, that is, there is backshifting when there is hinneh¯ + SC. Therefore, they are best translated as past perfects, the past tense equivalent of the present perfect which I have used to translate hinneh¯ + SC when TT TU. A ⊃ visual representation of this is provided in fig. 12, which is an illustration of (27a). The other examples follow the same principle: TSit precedes TT which in turn precedes TU (past event).

Figure 12: Representation of Gen. 8:13

Noah looks [TT]

TU (time) face of ground dry up[TSit]

In a paper on word-order change as related to tense-aspect in BH, Givón (1977:223) treats w@hinneh¯ as a complementizer with the information expressed in the clause governed by it just like the information found in relative clauses, calling it “presupposed information”. In fact, while not addressing the role of hinneh¯ in his argument, he does assume that the coordinated variant is used in a similar way as še- and Pašer, although he thinks w@hinneh¯ and k¯ı represent an older stage of the language. This descrip- tion of the w@hinneh¯ clause is absolutely in line with what was noticed in these examples: Just like after Pašer and k¯ı, SC after hinneh¯ expresses an event that occurred before the event of the main clause, i.e., anteriority in past contexts. However, I do not agree that w@hinneh¯ is a complementizer on the same grounds as še- and Pašer, even though it has been analyzed as such in some of the literature30 since they

30. At least by Follingstad according to Cohen (2014).

30 have different syntactic behaviors. In fact, še- and Pašer introduce embedded clauses and are syntacti- cally necessary whenever used, while (w@-)hinneh¯ does not seem to have that kind of syntactic behavior since it does not introduce a dependent clause, and can start a clause on its own. This is also the reason why I do not translate wayyarP w@hinneh¯ as ‘he saw that’ as Givón (1977:193) does, since (27c) and (27d) clearly show that there is no subordination involved between the two clauses. The use of w@hinneh¯ with and without the verb of perception indicates that the clause it scopes over is not syntactically dependent on the one preceding it, and gives more evidence to hinneh¯ as being used to disambiguate the perfect reading of the perfective. As a matter of fact, it is crucial in the narrative in (27c) and (27d) that the events in the hinneh¯ clause happen before the character arrives, and hinneh¯ once again makes this ordering clear. Without it, it is possible to interpret the two events as obtaining simultaneously.

Although most of the data points in this portion of the sample confirm what has been observed in the previous section, there are a two problematic examples that need more careful attention: (28) and (29) contradict the general pattern observed until now.

(Kgs 13:21 2) ו®יžהִי הMֵ קֹבְר£יM אִשׁ וžהִנּ¦ה ר´אוּ אֶתÊהַגּžדוּד! (28) way@h¯ı hem¯ qob¯ r¯ım Piš w@-hinneh¯ ra¯Pu¯ Pet hag-g@dud¯ be.PFV.3MSG 3PL bury.PTCP.MPL man and-HINNEH see.PFV.3MPL DOM DEF-band As they were burying a man, suddenly, they saw the band of raiders.

(Gen 37:7) וžהִנּ¦ה אֲנ®חְנוּ מְאַלְּמִיM אֲלuמּMִ בְּתוֹ› הµšַד»ה וžהִנּ¦ה קָמָה אֲלuמָּתִי וžג®ÊMנ¢צָּבָה וžהִנּ¦ה תְסuבֶּיÉה אֲלuמֹּתֵיכMֶ! (29) w@-hinneh¯ P˘anah. nu m@Pall@m¯ım P˘alumm¯ım b@-tok¯ ha´s-´sadeh¯ w@-hinneh¯ qam¯ a¯ and-HINNEH we bind.PTCP.PL sheaves in-midst DEF-field and-HINNEH arise.PFV.3FSG P˘alummat-¯ ¯ı w@-gam nis.s.ab¯ ah¯ w@-hinneh¯ t@subbeynah¯ P˘alummotey-k¯ em sheaf-1SG and-also stand.PFV.3FSG and-HINNEH surround.IPFV.3FPL sheaves-2MPL We were binding sheaves in the field, and suddenly, my sheaf arose and stood upright while your sheaves were gathering around it.

In the two examples above, the event reported with hinneh¯ + SC happens simultaneously with another event: the burying in (28) and the sheaving in (29). Here, the perfective preceded by hinneh¯ does not advance TT, but there is no back-shifting effect either: Both events happen at the same time, and hinneh¯ is not used in the same way it is used in (27a)–(27d). Rather, it seems to introduce a sudden event dis- rupting the course of the background event expressed with the active participle. I am not sure what the best explanation for these two outliers is. It is worth noting here that Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011:61) exclude (29) from their survey because it appears in a dream report, claiming that the frequency of hinneh¯ in this type of context is “much higher” than in real world contexts. In fact, this example alone contains the presentative three times, including with the imperfective (cf. discussion in §4.2 below). Since I argue that hinneh¯ has different functions all relating to its deictic semantic core depending on the type of clause it occurs with, and that with the perfective, it is a strategy making a certain reading of the perfective more easily retrievable by the hearer, it seems that its use here is an indication of the lack of regularity of this strategy. Until now, all of the examples have confirmed the hypothesis, but hinneh¯ is

31 not a fully grammaticalized perfect marker, so there are bound to be some examples that contradict the predictions made above.

Nevertheless, we can say that there is a strong tendency in past tense narration for hinneh¯ + SC to be used as a back shifting strategy. Thus, my analysis of hinneh¯ accounts for its use both when TT TU ⊃ and when TT TU. Setting the problematic data points aside, in both cases, the event introduced by ≺ hinneh¯ happens before TT. Under this account, there is no need to posit a complementizer function for w@hinneh¯ in past tense narration31 or think of hinneh¯ and w@hinneh¯ as two different words since the use of the presentative in the past tense is derivable from its use in present tense contexts.

Having treated both past and present tense contexts for the use of hinneh¯ + SC, we can now move on to the future tense.

4.1.3 Topic Time Utterance Time  In the sample that I surveyed, there is only one example where hinneh¯ + SC is used where the TT follows TU, i.e., TT is in the future.

(Num 32:23) וžאÊMִל¸א תַעֲשׂוּN כּNֵ הִנּ¦ה חֲטָאתMֵ לַיהו³ה וּדŸעוּ חַטַּאתְכMֶ אֲשׁ¬ר תִּמְצָא אֶתְכMֶ!! (30) w@-Pim lo¯P taQ˘a´sun¯ ken¯ hinneh¯ h. ˘at.a¯Ptem la-yhwh u-d@Qu¯ h. at..taPt-@kem CONJ-if NEG do.IPFV.2PL thus HINNEH sin.PFV.2PL PREP-Lord CONJ-know.IMP.2MPL sin-2MSG Pašerˇ [email protected]¯P Pet-@kem COMP find.IPFV.3FSG DOM-2MPL If you will not do so [i.e., take arms],32 you will have sinned against the lord and know that your sin will find you.

(30) is a conditional sentence which is set after TU: The verse appears in a larger context where all the events described in the dialogue are future-shifted. So, as opposed to the description of conditional statements in Leviticus (p. 27) where TT TU, here, the discourse participants consider two possible ⊃ worlds that are both post-TU. (30) is one of the two possible worlds, in which the Israelites do not take arms.

This particular conditional sentence has been grouped together with “conditional promises and threats” by Bivin (2017:184–192) most of which show a very regular behavior with imperfective verbs in both the protasis (yiqtol¯ ) and the apodosis (yiqtol¯ or w@qatal¯ ).33 In fact, following Bivin’s (2017) count, in the sam- ple surveyed for this paper, (30) is the only one of two future referring conditionals where the perfective is used in the apodosis.34 This means that the use of the perfective in this sentence is marked, i.e., not a normal conditional use that one finds in e.g., Arabic, where both verbs are usually in the perfective, and it can be shown that the addition of hinneh¯ before it is not fortuitous.

31. In any case, Givón’s (1977) description of w@hinneh¯ as a complementizer would not account for (28) and (29). 32. Context provided in Num. 32:20. -conditionals. Consequently, the parsimo אYiqtols are the preferred gram for construing post-speech eventualities in !Mִ“ .33 nious use of qatals in the P clause of both conditional promises and threats is not surprising.” (Bivin 2017:187) 34. The other one is 1Sam. 2:16, where the protasis is verbless.

32 As a matter of fact, in the possible world where the events in (30) happen after the time of utterance, three situations obtain in chronological order: the people not taking arms, the sinning which is the con- sequence of not taking arms, and the sin finding the people. The first situation advances TT and thus introduces a second TT, say, the underspecified [after not taking arms], which is then the TT for the sec- ond situation (the sinning). As for the third situation, we can tell that it obtains during that time interval, but it should have its own, more specific TT.35 Fig. 13 offers a visual representation of this, where [after not taking arms] is abbreviated as [after nta].

Figure 13: Representation of Num 32:23

not take arms [TSit1] after nta [TT2]

TU (time) sin [TSit2] sin find you [TSit3]

Crucially here, the TSit of sinning is evaluated relative to TT , which falls after it, that is, TSit TT which 2 2 ≺ 2 gives a perfect reading for hinneh¯ h. ˘at.a¯Ptem. We can compare (30) with the other example of “conditional promise” reported by Bivin (2017) where the apodosis contains a perfective. In (31), the bare perfective is set in the future, post TU, since by definition, the event of (not) giving can only happen after the utterance has been completed. However, the bare perfective laqah¯ . t¯ı is sequential to the event of not giving in the protasis, and there is no perfect nuance whatsoever.

(Sam 2:16 1) ל¸א כִּי עַתָּה תִתּNֵ וžאÊMִל¸א לָקַחתִּי בְחָזžקָה! (31) lo¯P k¯ı Qattah¯ titten¯ w@-P¯ım lo¯P laqah¯ . t¯ı b@-h. az¯ @qah¯ NEG because now give.IMP.2MSG and-if NEG take.PFV.1SG with-force No, you must give it now, and if not, I will take it by force.

The contrast between these two conditional sentences demonstrates that the use of hinneh¯ before the SC in (30) is once again a strategy employed by the authors in order to restrict the possible interpretations of the bare verb, which, as shown by (31) can have a future perfective reading. Here, it restricts its readings to a future perfect.

The examination of hinneh¯ + SC in different contexts relative to the time of utterance has lead to seeing the strong tendency for the construction to induce perfect interpretation. So far, however, I have only discussed hinneh¯ + SC with dynamic predicates: They represent the bulk of the data and they have a consistent behavior. By contrast, stative predicates—as it has already been noted above in §2.2—behave much less consistently, displaying different readings that are highly dependent on the context of the utterance.

35. This more specific TT is not provided by the context, but I assume its existence since the underspecified [after not taking arms] is too general and would yield a problematic relationship between TT and TSit, namely TT TSit (= perfective) for an ⊃ imperfective verb form. It is more likely that [after not taking arms] provides us with “a time within which” rather than a definite TT for TSit3.

33 4.1.4 Stative Predicates

Out of the 133 instances of hinneh¯ followed by a perfective verb, there are 9 instances where the predicate is stative. They posit a problem in so far as they already have an unpredictable behavior with the plain perfective, which makes it harder to define their interpretation when hinneh¯ is present. As a reminder, without hinneh¯ , a stative verb in the perfective can minimally have three readings: Present state, past state, and ingressive. In this section, I lay out the data and organize it by root, and show how each verb behaves in the different contexts in which it appears.

The first root that I consider here is pzqn. This root appears 20 times in the sample that I surveyed, and twice preceded by hinneh¯ . The instances where it is a bare perfective (32) vs. following hinneh¯ (33) seem to have quite a neat distribution that depends on the context of utterance.

(32) pzqn INTHEPERFECTIVE: (Gen 18:13) הַאPַ אuמMÉְ אֵלֵד ו®אֲנ¢י ז³קַנžתִּי! .a ha-Pap¯ Pumnam¯ Pel¯ ed¯ wa-˘an¯ı zaqant¯ ¯ı INTERR-indeed indeed bear.IPFV.1SG and-1SG be_old.PFV.1SG Shall I indeed bear a child when I am old?

(Josh 23:2) אֲנ¢י ז³קַנžתִּי בָּאתִי בַּיּ³מִיb. !M ˘an¯ı zaqant¯ ¯ı ba¯Pt¯ı ba-yam¯ ¯ım 1SG be_old.PFV.1SG come.PFV.1SG in.DEF-days I am old and well advanced in years.

(33) pzqn INTHEPERFECTIVEPRECEDEDBYHINNEH¯ : (Gen 27:2) ו®יּ¸אמֶר הִנּ¦הÉÊא ז³קַנžתִּי ל¸א י³ד¯עְתִּי יוֹM מוֹתִי! .a wayyo¯Pmer hinneh¯ zaqant¯ ¯ı lo¯P yada¯ Qt¯ı yom¯ mot-¯ ¯ı say.PFV.3MSG HINNEH be_old.PFV.1SG NEG know.PFV.1SG day death-1SG He said: I have become old and I do not know the day of my death. (Sam 8:5 1) הִנּ¦ה אַתָּה ז³קַנžתָּ וּבָנªיœ ל¸א הָלְכוּ בִּדŸר´כֶיœ! .b hinneh¯ Pattah¯ zaqant¯ ah¯ w@-baney-k¯ a¯ lo¯P hal¯ @ku¯ bi-d@rak¯ ey-ka¯ HINNEH 2SG be_old.PFV.2SG and-sons-2SG NEG walk.PFV.3MPL in-paths-2SG You have grown old, and your sons do not walk in your ways.36

In (32), the context provides information that the character is old, and has been for a while: The reader knows that about Sara in Genesis as her lack of period is referenced a couple of verses before. Similarly, Joshua is described as being old ten chapters before the sentence in (32b) is uttered. By contrast, the examples with hinneh¯ are both uttered by characters who—we are told in the narrative—have just gotten old or have become old. Crucially, there seems to be an ingressive or a change of state nuance added by the use of hinneh¯ , which is absent in (32). It is worth noting here that some French translations

36. New American Standard Bible translation.

34 of the Bible render these two verses as “Je suis devenu vieux”37 and “Tu es devenu vieux,”38 which in my opinion, are preferable to the KJV “Behold now, I am old/thou art old.” Moreover, upon superficial examination of the 20 occurrences of pzqn in the corpus,39 it seems that they all have a present state reading in direct speech and a past state reading in narrative, except in Gen 27:1 and 1Sam 8:1—the two verses that inform us of the character becoming old before the verses in (33)—where it is embedded under k¯ı and kaP˘ašer ‘when’ respectively. Therefore, it seems that hinneh¯ is providing an additional aspectual nuance in (33). p There are four instances of hinneh¯ followed by ydQ in the perfective in the sample, all laid out in (34) with information about their contexts of appearance.

p (34) HINNEH¯ + ydQ PERFECTIVE: a. Context: Abraham and Sarai are on their way to Egypt and when they are close to entering, Abraham says to his wife: (Gen 12:11) הִנּ¦הÉÊא י³ד¯עְתִּי כִּי אµ™ִה יžפַתÊמַרŸאֶה אָתְּ! hinneh-n¯ a¯P yada¯ Qt¯ı k¯ı Piššah¯ y@pat¯ marPeh Patt¯ HINNEH-INTERJ know.PFV.1SG that woman beautiful appearance you I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance. b. Context: After having cut off all the mediums from the land, Saul needs one so he disguises himself and goes to the one remaining medium who says: (Sam 28:9 1) הִנּ¦ה אַתַּה י³ד¯עְתָּ אֵת אֲשׁ¬רÊעָשׂµה שׁµאוּל אֲשׁ¬ר הÇִר£ית אֶתÊהָאֹבוֹת וžאֶתÊהַיּ¢דּŸעֹנ¢י מÊNִהָאָר»Z! hinneh¯ Pattah¯ yada¯ Qta¯ Pet¯ ˘ašer Qa´s¯ ah¯ ša¯Pul¯ ˘ašer hikr¯ıt HINNEH 2SG know.PFV.2MSG DOM that do.PFV.3MSG Saul that cut_off.PFV.3MSG Pet-ha-¯ Pob¯ ot¯ w@-Pet-ha-yidQon¯ ¯ı min ha-¯ Pares¯ . DOM-DEF-mediums and-DEF-spiritists from DEF-land Surely you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off the mediums and the wizards from the land. c. Context: Whenever he goes to Shunem, Elisha eats at this wealthy woman’s house, who tries to convince her husband to make room for him in their house. (Kgs 4:9 2) הִנּ¦הÉÊא י³ד¯עְתִּי כִּי אִישׁ אֱל·הִיM קָדוֹשׁ הוּא עֹבֵר עָלֵינוּ תָּמִיד! hinneh–n¯ a¯P yada¯ Qt¯ı k¯ı P¯ıš Pel˘ oh¯ ¯ım qad¯ oš¯ hu¯P Qob¯ er¯ Qal-¯ eyn¯ u¯ tam¯ ¯ıd HINNEH-INTERJ know.PFV.1SG that man god holy 3MSG pass.PTCP on-us always I know that this is a holy man of God who is continually passing our way. d. Context: Elisha asks a skeptical leprous man to go wash himself in a specific manner in order to be healed. After the miracle, the man says to Elisha: (Kgs 5:15 2) הִנּ¦הÉÊא י³ד¯עְתִּי כִּי אֵיN אֱל·הִיM בּÈְלÊהָאָר»Z כִּי אÊMִבְּי¢שׂר´אֵל! hinneh-n¯ a¯P yada¯ Qt¯ı k¯ı Peyn¯ Pel˘ oh¯ ¯ım b@-kol ha-¯ Pares¯ . k¯ı Pim b@-yi´sra¯Pel¯ HINNEH-INTERJ know.PFV.1SG that NEG god in-all DEF-land that if in-Israel

37. La Bible Martin. 38. The Bible translated by the members of the French Rabbinate. 39. Gen 18:12, Gen 18:13, Gen 19:31, Gen 24:1, Gen 27:1, Josh 13:1 (x2), Josh 23:1, Josh 23:2, 1Sam 2:22, 1Sam 4:18, 1Sam 8:1, 1Sam 12:2, 1Sam 17:2, 2Sam 19:33, 1Kgs 1:15, 2Kgs 4:14.

35 Now I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.

In all of these examples, hinneh¯ yada¯ Q is in direct speech, and refers to a present state “I/you know,” perhaps with additional nuances. In (34a), it seems that Abraham is not providing information about the state of his knowledge. In fact, they are just about to enter Egypt, and it would be an awkward moment to tell Sarai that he knows that she is beautiful in order to ask her to pretend that she is his sister. Rather, it has just occurred to him that she is beautiful, and thus that the Egyptians will kill him if they knew she was his wife and that they should pretend she is his sister. In (34b), we can infer an ingressive notion best translated as “surely you have heard/learned about what Saul did,” since in the context of this dialogue, Saul cutting off the mediums is a highly relevant recent event. In addition, (34d) has a clearer ingressive notion easily inferable from context since the man speaking had just accepted the fact that God was only in Israel. Therefore, we can translate hinneh-n¯ a¯P yada¯ Qt¯ı as “I have realized”. By contrast, (34c) is different from the three other examples, since the woman is actually reporting on the state of her current knowledge, and there doesn’t seem to be any recent learning or realization, but rather, she is just saying to her husband what she knows about this man.

Given these examples we can say that there is a tendency for hinneh¯ yada¯ Q to have a specific mean- ing that might not be conveyed by the bare perfective, but the outlier (34c) and the limited number of examples, as well as the lack of studies on the possible readings of yada¯ Q without hinneh¯ make these comments speculative for now. p Moving on to the stative hyh which appears twice in the corpus, both in past tense narration.

p (35) HINNEH + hyh perfective: (1Sam 14:20) ו®יּ¢זּ³עֵק שׁµאוּל וȞלÊהָעMָ ו®יּ³ב¸אוּ עַדÊהַמִּלְחָמָה וžהִנּ¦ה הָיžתַה חֶר»ב אִישׁ בְּר§עֵהוּ! .a wayyiza¯Qeq¯ ša¯Pul¯ w@-kol ha-¯ Qam¯ wayyab¯ o¯Pu Qad ham-milh. am¯ ah¯ cry_out.IPFV.3MSG Saul and-all DEF-people come.IPFV.3MPL until DEF-war w@-hinneh¯ hay¯ @tah¯ h. ereb P¯ıš b@-re¯Q-ehu¯ and-HINNEH be.PFV.3FSG sword man in-fellow-3MSG Saul and all the people rallied and went into the battle. And behold, every man’s sword was against his fellow. (1Kgs 3:21) ו³אֶתְבֹּונ¦N אֶלָיו בַּבֹּקֶר וžהִנּ¦ה ל¸אÊהָי³ה בְנ¢י אֲשׁ¬ר י³לָדŸתִּי! .b wa¯Petbon¯ en¯ Pel-¯ aw¯ bab-boqer¯ w@-hinneh¯ lo¯P hay¯ ah¯ b@n-¯ı P˘ašer look.PFV.1SG to-3MSG in.DEF-morning and-HINNEH NEG be.PFV.3MSG son-1SG that yal¯ adt¯ ¯ı bear.PFV.1SG When I looked at him closely in the morning, behold, he was not the child that I had borne.

In both of these examples, the verb ‘to be’ describes states that obtain or begin obtaining before the character’s looking. While in (35a), the characters already know that there is a battle around them and in this sense, there doesn’t seem to be much surprise involved in their seeing the battle, (35b) seems to confirm Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe’s (2011) theory of hinneh¯ as a mirative marker. For now, I do

36 not have a proper analysis of these examples since this would necessitate a good grasp of this particular stative verb’s behavior in unmarked contexts. p Finally, h. ps. occurs only once, when Saul commands his servants to tell David that he likes him.

(1Sam 18:22) דּ¯בְּרוּ אֶלÊדּ´ו¢ד בַּלָּט לֵאמֹר הִנּ¦ה חָפZֵ בְּœ הַמֶּלֶ› וȞלÊאֲבָד´יו אֲהֵבוּœ! (36) dabb@ru¯ Pel dawid¯ bal-lat¯. le¯Pmor¯ hinneh¯ h. a¯p¯es¯. b@-ka¯ ham-melek speak.IMP.2MPL to David in.DEF-secrecy say.INF HINNEH delight.PFV.3MSG in-2MSG DEF-king w@-kol Q˘abad-¯ aw¯ P˘aheb¯ u-k¯ a¯ and-all servants-3MPL love.PFV.3MPL-2MSG Speak to David in private and say “The king has delight in you, and all his servants love you.”

Saul gives this command to his servants because he wants David to marry his daughter, which is all part of a plot against David. This happens after he has tried to physically hurt David, and so it is clear to David that Saul does not like him. From this context, the audience knows that the servants’ task is to convince David that Saul, who clearly did not like David before, has gotten to like him. Here again, it appears that hinneh¯ restricts the stative root to its change of state reading, as opposed to the bare perfective, which would have a present state reading in this context.40

This investigation of the stative roots in the sample is far from complete as one would need to conduct a study on this type of roots without any other marker in order to tell what hinneh¯ ’s contribution truly is. Nonetheless, it provides a starting point as part of this larger study and can be completed by future research.

4.1.5 Summary

In this section, I have reviewed all the uses of hinneh¯ with the perfective in the corpus, taking into ac- count the contexts of use relative to the time of utterance and the type of predicates (dynamic vs. sta- tive). Despite the difficulty of interpreting the examples with stative roots, it is clear that the construction hinneh¯ + SC is used in the Bible in a fairly regular fashion: The authors saw it as a strategy for express- ing an aspectual nuance for which the bare perfective was underspecified. The choice of hinneh¯ makes sense in this context since it is a deictic marker first and foremost: In the context of sentences with per- fective verbs, hinneh¯ was not used to point at people or objects like it does in verbless clauses, but rather to point to the relationship between the TSit and a salient TT. Since a bare perfective verb has an un- marked past reading, hinneh¯ was added before it in order to anchor the event in the time of utterance (the contextual TT in direct speech), just like the present perfect in English “says something both about the past and about the present” (Portner 2003a:1224). In past and future settings, instead of anchoring the event to TU, it points to its relation with the contextual TT, with the back shifting effects described in §4.1.2 and the future perfect reading analyzed in §4.1.3. Finally, this consistency in the readings of hinneh¯ + SC is exceptional considering that the prefix conjugation is found with hinneh¯ much less fre-

40. I use the English Standard Version’s translation in the example, but I do think that it is better translated as an ingressive.

37 quently. The following section tackles this set of data, whose scarcity has been noticed before but never explained.

4.2 Hinneh¯ and the Imperfective

As reported in table 3, hinneh¯ + PC is a rare collocation, appearing 9 times41 against 133 for hinneh¯ + SC. This number is representative of the entire Biblical text, since the scarcity of this pattern is also pointed out by Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011) who have analyzed all occurrences of hinneh¯ in the Bible. In fact, they dub the pattern “atypical” (ibid.:68-80), without providing possible explanations for this unusual construction. I believe the rarity of hinneh¯ + PC can be explained by the effect it has on the perfective. Before turning to that, I lay out all the relevant examples in (37), (38) and (39) according to their TT relative to TU.

(37) HINNEH¯ + IMPERFECTIVE (TT TU): ⊃ (1Sam. 21:15) ו®יּ¸אמֶר אָכִישׁ אֶלÊעֲבָד´יו הִנּ¦ה תִרŸאוּ אִישׁ מִשׁ תַּגּ¦עַ לָמָּה תַּבִיאוּ אֹתוֹ אֵלָי! .a wayyo¯Pmer Pak¯ ¯ıš Pel-Q˘abad¯ a-w¯ hinneh¯ tirPu¯ P¯ıš say.PFV.3MSG Achish PREP-servants-3MSG HINNEH see.IPFV.2MPL man mištagge¯aQ lamm¯ ah¯ tab¯ıPu¯ Pot¯ -o¯ Pel-¯ ay¯ become_crazy.PTCP.MSG why bring.IPFV.2MPL DOM-3MSG PREP-1SG Achish said to his servants: “You see the man getting mad, why bring him to me?” (Kgs 8:27 1) הִנּ¦ה הµ™ַמַי¢M וּשׁ מֵי הµ™ַמַי¢M ל¸א יžכַלְכְּלוּœ! .b hinneh¯ haš-šamayim¯ u-š@mey¯ haš-šamayim¯ lo¯P y@kalk@lu-k¯ a¯ HINNEH DEF-heaven and-heavens DEF-heaven NEG contain.IPFV.3MPL-2msg Behold, the heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you.

These two examples have TT and TU overlapping, but the reading of the imperfective verb is different in each one. While tirPu¯ in (37) is a present progressive, y@kalk@lu-k¯ a¯ in (37b) is a present gnomic. The first is closely tied to the utterance time, where hinneh¯ points to an event as it is happening: The discourse participants are witnessing the man getting mad as Achish speaks. The latter, however, points to a general fact about God, whose truth conditions do not depend on the events happening at TU.

The only example with hinneh¯ + PC in past tense narration is a verse where the presentative appears three times: before a present participle, a perfective verb and imperfective verb.

(38) HINNEH¯ + IMPERFECTIVE (TT TU): ≺ (Gen 37:7) וžהִנּ¦ה אֲנ®חְנוּ מְאַלְּמִיM אֲלuמּMִ בְּתוֹ› הµšַד»ה וžהִנּ¦ה קָמָה אֲלuמָּתִי וžג®ÊMנ¢צָּבָה וžהִנּ¦ה תְסuבֶּיÉה אֲלuמֹּתֵיכMֶ!

41. There might be one more example of hinneh¯ + PC that I did not include here because of different interpretations of the scope of hinneh¯ . In 1Sam 14:43, Jonathan says hinn@ni Pam¯ ut¯ , which some translations parse as two different sentences as in “Here I am, I will die” (ESV) or as one sentence as in “Lo, I must die” (KJV). It is difficult to determine which interpretation is better in this context.

38 w@-hinneh¯ P˘anah. nu m@Pall@m¯ım P˘alumm¯ım b@-tok¯ ha´s-´sadeh¯ w@-hinneh¯ qam¯ ah¯ and-HINNEH we bind.PTCP.PL sheaves in-midst DEF-field and-HINNEH arise.PFV.3FSG P˘alummat-¯ ¯ı w@-gam nis.s.ab¯ ah¯ w@-hinneh¯ t@subbeynah¯ P˘alummotey-k¯ em sheaf-1SG and-also stand.PFV.3FSG and-HINNEH surround.IPFV.3FPL sheaves-2MPL We were binding sheaves in the field, and suddenly, my sheaf arose and stood upright while your sheaves were gathering around it.

This verse has already been discussed above (§4.1.2) as it contradicts the predictions of my analysis by having hinneh¯ preceding the perfective where no back shifting seems to be intended. The use of hinneh¯ with the imperfective is not less puzzling. The verb t@subbeynah¯ on its own seems to have a past progres- sive reading, opposing it to the preceding perfectives (qam¯ ah¯ and nis.s.ab¯ ah¯ ) that express two sequential actions. It is unclear what the value of hinneh¯ is in this particular case, since its use three times in a row makes it seem more like a conjunction than anything else.42

Finally, the majority of the examples with the imperfective have a future TT, referring to events happen- ing after TU.

(39) HINNEH¯ + IMPERFECTIVE (TT TU):  (Gen. 27:39) ו®יּ®עNַ י¢צחָק אָבִיו ו®יּ¸אמֶר אֵלָיו הִנּ¦ה מִשׁ מַנּ¦י הָאָר»Z י¢הְיªה מוֹשׁµבֶœ וּמִטַּל הַשׁµמַי¢M מֵעָל! .a wayyaQan yis.h. aq¯ Pab¯ ¯ıw wayyo¯Pmer Pelaw¯ hinneh¯ mi-šmanney answer.PFV.3MSG Isaac father-3MSG say.PFV.3MSG PREP-3MSG HINNEH PREP-fats ha-¯ Pares¯ . yihyeh moš¯ ab¯ -eka¯ u-mi-t.al haš-šamaym me-¯ Qal¯ DEF-earth be.IPFV.3MSG dwelling-2MSG CONJ-PREP-dew DEF-skies from-on Isaac, his father answered him saying: away from the fat of the earth your dwelling will be and away from the dew of heaven on high. (Ex. 32:34) וžעַתָּה לֵ› נžחֵה אֶתÊהָעMָ! [...] הִנּ¦ה מַלְאָכִי י¦לֵ› לְפָנªיœ! .b w@-Qattah¯ lek¯ n@h. eh¯ Pet ha-¯ Qam¯ [...] hinneh¯ malPak¯ -¯ı and-now go.IMP.2MSG lead.IMP.2MSG DOM DEF-people [...] HINNEH angel-1SG yel¯ ek¯ l@paney-k¯ a go.IPFV.3MSG before-2MSG Now go lead the people [...] Behold, my angel will go before you. (Josh 24:27) הִנּ¦ה הָאֶבNֶ הַזּ¸את תִּהְי¦הÊבָּנוּ לְעֵד´ה! .c hinneh¯ ha-¯ Peben haz-zo¯Pt tihiyeh ba-nu¯ l@-Qed¯ ah¯ HINNEH DEF-stone DEF-this be.IPFV.3FSG in-1PL to-witness Behold, this stone will be a witness against us. (1Sam. 20:21) וžהִנּ¦ה אֶשׁלַח אֶתÊהַנּ®עַר לֵ› מְצָא אֶתÊהַחִצִּיd. !M w@-hinneh¯ Pešlah. Pet-ha-nnaQar lek¯ [email protected]¯P Pet-ha-h. is.s.¯ım CONJ-HINNEH send.IPFV.1SG DOM-DEF-boy go.IMP.2SG find.IMP.2SG DOM-arrows I will send the boy [saying] “go find the arrows”

42. As pointed out by Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011), hinneh¯ has a high frequency of use in dream reports, so much so that they do not include this example in their analysis.

39 (Judg 21:21) לְכוּ ו®אֲר¯בְתּMֶ בַּכְּר´מִיM וּרŸאִיתMֶ וžהִנּ¦ה אÊMִי¦צְאוּ בְנוֹתÊשׁ¤ילוֹ לָחוּל בַּמְּחֹלוֹת ו¢יצָאתMֶ מÊNִהַכְּר´מִיe. !M l@ku¯ waP˘arabtem bak-k@ram¯ ¯ım ur@P¯ıtem w@-hinneh¯ Pim go.IMP.2MPL ambush.IPFV.2MPL in.DEF-vineyards see.IPFV.2MPL and-HINNEH if yes¯.@Pu¯ b@not¯ š¯ılo¯ la-h¯ . ul¯ bam-m@h. ol¯ ot¯ w¯ıs.atem¯ go_out.IPFV.3MPL daughters Shiloh to-dance.INF in.DEF-dances go_outIPFV.2MPL Go and lie in ambush in the vineyards and watch: If the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then come out. (1Sam. 9:7) ו®יּ¸אמֶר שׁµאוּל לְנ®עֲרוֹ וžהִנּ¦ה נ¦לKֵ וּמַהÊנּ³בִיא לָאִישׁ! .f wayyo¯Pmer ša¯Pul¯ l@-naQ˘ar-o¯ w@-hinneh¯ nel¯ ek¯ say.PFV.3MSG Saul PREP-servant-3MSG CONJ-HINNEH go.IPFV.1PL u-mah-nnab¯ ¯ıP la-¯ P¯ıš CONJ-INTER-bring.IPFV.1PL PREP-man Saul said to his servant: “[If] we go, what do we bring to the man?”

All these examples have in common that the reading of the imperfective is that of general future, but the contexts are all very different. (39a) is a blessing—a curse in disguise really—pronounced by Isaac to his son, so the verb refers to events that will happen at some point in the distant future. (39b) contains an event that will happen soon after TU, while (39c) contains a state that will hold after TU. (39d) refers to a future event that happens three days after the time of utterance according to the narrative. In this sense, there is no common denominator for these examples as far as proximity in time is concerned. As for (39e) and (39f), both are very peculiar as they are conditional statements, the first having a clear conditional marker Pim. I have considered above on p. 26 the arguments provided by Waltke and O’Connor (1990) for hinneh¯ as marking the logical connection—in this case conditional—between two clauses. While their suggestion might work for (39f), there clearly is no need for hinneh¯ in (39e), where Pim fulfills that func- tion. Joüon’s (1947:516) explanation for (39f) is that “la nuance conditionnelle virtuelle est due au double waw, non à [hinneh¯ ] qui joue le rôle de mot tampon comme le ferait [˘anah. nu] [...] l’idée conditionnelle implicite est due au contexte, non à [w@hinneh¯ ]”. According to him, then, hinneh¯ is merely separating the conjunction waw from the imperfective verb nel¯ ek¯ , preventing its interpretation as a retentive form, i.e., a perfective (id.:506). The idea of a “buffer word” seems problematic to me, because that would have further implications for hinneh¯ ’s semantics, which would have to be very weak at this point to allow a use where it does not contribute any meaning to the sentence. Concerning (39e), it is also unclear what the function of hinneh¯ is here as it immediately precedes the protasis of a conditional sentence and does not seem to play any particular role. Moreover, Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011:61) could not account for these two examples containing conditional statements. So, even according to their model, hinneh¯ cannot be a mirative marker in (39e) and (39f).

Examples (37)–(39) do not have much in common and we cannot isolate a particular function for hinneh¯ in these verses, in contrast with the clarity of the readings of hinneh¯ + perfective. That is, on top of being rarely attested, hinneh¯ is not used in a consistent way with the imperfective. This behavior can be explained by the semantics of hinneh¯ as well as the relationship between the two finite forms of BH to TU/TT. In fact, hinneh¯ is a deictic element composing with different parts of the language to yield

40 different nuances all tied to its semantic core. It generally ties a proposition to the relevant context: In verbless clauses, this amounts to pointing at entities (people, objects) in the space surrounding the discourse participants or in the discourse. In verbal sentences, it is the whole predication that is pointed to in relationship to the salient reference time shared by the discourse participants. Unless specified otherwise,43 the unmarked shared TT is usually the utterance time. While the PC as an imperfective category can unmarkedly be tied to the time of utterance by virtue of its present tense readings, the perfective is absolutely not indexical in that respect. The unmarked reading of the SC is past, and events expressed in the perfective have their own TT which includes them (cf. fig. 2 on p. 4). What hinneh¯ does is keep that situation time in the past and point to a different TT:44 In the present, this different TT is TU, in the past, it is the event expressed before in the clause. The deictic nature of the presentative is perfect for this function: While it is commonly used in verbless clauses to physically point to things and people, in verbal sentences, it points to the relationship between the event expressed by the perfective and the TT, giving a different anchor to the sentence following hinneh¯ . By contrast, the imperfective by virtue of its unmarked readings is already minimally anchored in TT/TU and does not need such a device. This explains why there is such a big difference in the number occurrences of hinneh¯ between the two finite forms of BH, as well as the irregularity of its use with the PC.45

Until now, I have reviewed all uses of hinneh¯ with the two finite verbal forms of BH and have attempted to explain these uses and their more general patterns. While hinneh¯ is consistently employed as a perfect marker in the perfective domain, its appearance with imperfective verb forms is much less common and does not have a clear explanation. These facts—in particular the use of the presentative with the perfective—are not peculiar to Hebrew. As a matter of fact, the use of deictics in tense aspect systems is an attested but understudied phenomenon, and this paper provides more evidence for it. The following section tackles possible parallels to the analysis provided here.

5 Cross-linguistic Parallels to hinneh¯

This study is an additional example of an attested phenomenon: Deictics reducing the available readings of one or more verbal stems, as in Hittite (§5.1), and even becoming an integral part of the verbal system in a systematic manner, grammaticalizing into auxiliaries as in Neo-Aramaic (§5.2).

5.1 Hittite

Hittite has two related adverbs, kaša¯ and kašma¯ , which have as a base the homophonous proximal demonstrative ‘this’ and the adverb ‘here’ ka-¯ “denoting spacial proximity” (Hoffner and Melchert 2008:323). The compound “kaš¯ + =(m)a originally [...] must have meant ‘this then!’ ” (Kloekhorst 2008:461). kaša¯ and kašma¯ —just like hinneh¯ —are also treated as interjections, translated as ‘look here,

43. Either by a discourse participant reporting an event by giving a specific TT or by the context, e.g., in past tense narration. 44. Whether this is done by introducing an XN interval or by other means is still in the process of being worked out. I am currently trying to develop a meaning for hinneh¯ in order to be able to propose a compositional analysis for its uses with the perfective. 45. This discussion contains valuable input from a conversation with G. Ramchand in September 2019.

41 behold’ (Kloekhorst 2008:460). However, these translations fail to capture “the clear pattern of their use with the Hittite verbal tenses and the fundamental functions of these adverbs” (Hoffner and Melchert 2008:323). In fact, the authors show that these words have a “constraining function” (ibid.:309): They reduce the possible readings of the Hittite preterite to a present perfect (ibid.:324).

(40)H ITTITEKAŠAWITHPRETERITEVERBS¯ : a. [(k)]ašata¯ šmaš kan utniyandan laluš¯ da-h¯ hun DEIC 2PL.ACC LOC inhabitants.GEN tongues.ACC take-˘˘PRET.1SG.IND I have (just) taken the slanders (‘tongues’) of the population from you. KBo 17.1 i 11 (OS).

b. kinun-a kaša¯ fGaššuliyawiaš tu-el¯ GÉME-TUM ištarkia-t now-CONJ DEIC PN PRO-2SG.GEN servant get.sick-PRET.3SG Your servant Gaššuliyawia has become ill. KBo 4.6 obv. 27 (NH). 46

As for their function with present verbal forms, the authors point to three possible readings: Either the adverb “reinforces an ‘immediate present’ (contemporaneous with the speech act)”, or it “underscores the ‘performative’ force of the statement”, or it “points to the immediate future (‘be about to’)” (ibid.).

Thus, Hittite kašma¯ and BH hinneh¯ not only share their deictic function, but they also have the same role with the past47 verbal stems. In this respect, the Anatolian language offers an interesting typologi- cal parallel. However, just like for hinneh¯ , there are other analyses of kaša¯ and kašma¯ in the literature: Rieken (2009) argues that the particles’ primary function is spatial deixis to particular referents in the dis- course in order to disambiguate them in certain contexts, rejecting the temporal view argued by Hoffner and Melchert (2008). Marazzi (2015) accepts Rieken’s (2009) idea while also suggesting that they “under- line a temporal (real or metaphorical) gap (and accordingly a change of situation)” (Marazzi 2015:61), thus providing a different analysis from Hoffner and Melchert (2008), while still arguing for its use in the temporal domain. Like for Hebrew, it is hard to guarantee that any of these analyses is the correct one because there are no native speakers to confirm these intuitions. Fortunately, the typological parallels are not restricted to dead languages.

5.2 Neo-Aramaic

In the Jewish dialect of Zakho (JZ)—a branch of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic where “deitic copulas” (Co- hen 2017:2) have been innovated in order to avoid verbless clauses—the presentative copula wele¯ has many functions, very similar in its uses to hinneh¯ . In fact, it acts as a concrete presentative “introducing and object into [...] reality” (ibid.:7) as shown in (41), as well as an abstract presentative in (42), which Cohen (2017:11) sees as “both an answer to the question (=new information) and an account of what is seen.” Finally, he sets apart a third function, which he dubs “copular function”: “The presentative copula is the main vehicle for present-related affirmative compound tenses, namely, the present perfect and the

46. Both examples from Hoffner and Melchert 2008:324. 47. Preterite in Hittite and perfective in BH.

42 present progressive” (Cohen 2017:15).48

(41)C ONCRETE PRESENTATION IN JZ: (ibid.:7)

we-l-e¯ šulh. an d¯ıd-ox u hwe-l¯ e-le¯ xa šulh. an xeta¯ u PR.COP-3-MSG table POSS-2MSG and PRET.be_born-3MSG-DAT-3MSG INDEF table other and we-l-u¯ kutru šulh. an-e¯ PR.COP-3-PL both table-PL Here is your table, and another table was born to it, here are the two tables.

(42)A BSTRACT PRESENTATION IN JZ: (ibid.:12) durtyom¯ mux kut-šat se-le¯ h. akoma¯ u xze-le¯ we-l-e¯ naqosa next_day like every-year PRET.come-3MSG king and PRET.see-3MSG PR.COP-3-MSG missing garxıt Paw qut.ePfa again DET.MSG bunch The next day, like every year, the king came and saw: (lo,) the bunch is missing again!

(43)T HE PRESENT PERFECTIN JZ [wele¯ + PARTICIPLE] (Cohen 2015:254) hawwa la xabra we-l-e¯ zv¯ıra go kull-a masa¯ good PTC word PR.COP-3-MSG spread.PTCP.MSG in all-3FSG village After all, the word has spread in the entire village.

The present perfect in (43) is rendered by the deictic copula wele¯ and the participle. Another strategy of JZ is to use the particle wal—which also has a presentative function although its origin is uncertain— before a preterite form of the verb (Cohen 2014:36) as in (44).

(44)T HE PRESENT PERFECTIN JZ (wal + PRETERIT) (Cohen 2015:254) hawwa la kull-u wal šmeQ-lu Pıbb-a good PTC all-3PL WAL hear.PRET-3PL in-3FSG After all, everyone has heard about it.

As shown in the examples, the functions are so closely related in the two languages that one cannot help but draw parallels between the presentative constructions in Neo-Aramaic and BH. As a matter of fact, Cohen (2014) has drawn attention to this parallel by comparing hinneh¯ to wele¯ and wal, and came to the conclusion that both have shared functions, such as “pointing and drawing attention” and as a “completive strategy of perception verbs.” However, he says that “the function of the presentative hinne[h]¯ in the tense system of BH is not very clear” (ibid.:37). I hope that the research conducted here offers a bit more clarity as to this function.

Despite Neo-Aramaic and Hebrew belonging to the same language family, I doubt that this development has the same historical source for both languages. It seems more likely that it is a parallel develop-

48. The system is a bit more complex because the presentative copula is only used with 3rd persons, the 1st and 2nd person having their own copular forms.

43 ment, especially considering the recency of the incorporation of the presentative in the aspectual sys- tem of Neo-Aramaic. At any rate, the two languages give rise to interesting considerations, such as the way presentatives can grammaticalize from mere deictic adverbials to tense/aspect markers. For Cohen (2014:37), the bridge between the two functions is to be sought in the use of the presentative after verbs of seeing: “after perception verbs, presentatives reflect what is captured by the eye at the very moment of reference, which is tightly related to the here and now of the focalized character, namely the one whose point of view is shared.” This possible path will be explored in future research.

Lastly, I would like to briefly discuss the pragmatics of the perfect aspect and its relationship to eviden- tial categories cross-linguistically, and how this might relate to the uses of hinneh¯ . Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe (2011) posit a mirative meaning for hinneh¯ and many of the uses of the presentative that they ascribe to mirativity may overlap with the use of the perfect aspect in languages with a morpho- logical perfect. For instance, the idea that hinneh¯ points to something “which establishes a common ground” (ibid.:81) is very much parallel to the use of the English perfect in order to change the com- mon ground (Ritz 2011:903) or to negotiate a discourse topic with the hearer (Nishiyama and Koenig 2010:635). Furthermore, there is an attested diachronic relationship between mirativity or evidentiality in general and perfect aspect: Albanian has a (ad)mirative from of the verb that expresses “a complex of meanings including ‘surprise’, ‘disbelief’, and ‘report’.” (Friedman 2012:505), which can be traced to an original perfect form. Turkish’s past tense morpheme conveying indirect experience “is related his- torically and ontogenetically to the perfect” (Slobin and Aksu 1982:185). In these languages, the path is unidirectional from perfect to evidential/mirative.49 The overlapping semantics are explained by Comrie (1976) as lying “in the fact that both categories present an event not in itself, but via its results.” As for the development from perfect to evidential to specifically mirative, DeLancey (2001:378) claims that from its reanalysis into an evidential, the perfect morphology becomes able to express unexpectedness. These are interesting considerations to explore in future research, as they might be a sign that my analysis is not incompatible with Miller-Naudé and van der Merwe’s (2011) proposal, considering the pragmatics associated with the perfect aspect and its possible uses and developments.

The cross-linguistic tendencies discussed above are important to take into account to better understand how hinneh¯ was implemented as a strategy to mark perfect aspect but also why some of the uses of hinneh¯ to which evidential flavors are ascribed in the literature might be related to the semantics of the perfect.

6 Conclusion

In this paper, I have explored the interaction of hinneh¯ with the finite verbal forms of Biblical Hebrew and have shown that hinneh¯ is consistently used with the suffix conjugation as a strategy for marking the perfect, an aspectual value that is available to the bare perfective but left underspecified in the absence of any other markers. Through a detailed analysis of the three temporal contexts (TT relative to TU) where

49. “In general, we seem to be dealing here with originally perfect or perfective constructions, which have acquired a reading combining inferential status and mirativity” (DeLancey 2001:378)

44 hinneh¯ + SC appears, I have demonstrated how hinneh¯ ’s deictic meaning composes with the semantics of the perfective in order to point to a salient TT and relate the TSit in question to that TT.

Moreover, the analysis proposed here picks up on the rare use of hinneh¯ with imperfective verbs. While this scarcity has been noticed in the previous literature, to the best of my knowledge, no scholar has tried to find a cause for it. The use of hinneh¯ by the authors of the biblical text in order to disambiguate a perfective verb and make one of its readings available predicts its limited use with imperfective verbs. I have argued in §4.2 that this is due to the semantics of the two finite verbal forms and their relationship to the utterance time. The fact that my analysis predicts the range of available data is an important improvement compared to the previous descriptions of hinneh¯ that deem the scarcity of hinneh¯ + PC as purely incidental.

Furthermore, the fact that in most of the data, hinneh¯ scopes over a noun phrase shows that at the syn- chronic level, it is still very much a deictic marker acting as a concrete presentative, to use Cohen’s (2014) terms. That is to say, hinneh¯ is used in its main function as a presentative, and at the same time con- sistently employed as a strategy to mark the perfect. This strategy must have been important enough to yield a connection between perfect aspect and hinneh¯ and result in the language users’ dispreference of its association with the imperfective. In this sense, I do not believe that hinneh¯ could have actually been a strategy to mark mirativity, since there would be no reason to have a mirative marker that is dispro- portionately used throughout the language, except if there were an independent reason for unexpected events to be overwhelmingly expressed in the perfective (vs. the imperfective).

Thanks to a different approach focusing on the types of clauses hinneh¯ scopes over, as well as cross- linguistic evidence for the use of deictics in tense/aspect systems, my analysis has shown patterns which have gone previously unnoticed. I plan to extend this approach to future work on the presentative in order to focus on its function with active participles.

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