Alexander Andrason

Papers

1. Serial Verb Constructions in North-West Semitic languages: From a synchronic radiation back to the 'Big Bang' (2022)
   The paper compares serial verb constructions (two verbs forming one event, the first a "minor" verb adding aspect or mode) in Canaano-Akkadian, Ugaritic, Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic, measuring each against the prototype of a serial construction and its degree of grammaticalization.
2. The Structure of Interjections in Biblical Hebrew: Phonetics, Morphology, and Syntax (2020)
   The paper tests twelve primary emotive interjections of Biblical Hebrew (אֲהָהּ, אוֹי, הוֹי, אוֹיָה, אָח, הֶאָח, אַלְלַי, הָהּ, הוֹ and others: "ah, alas, woe, aha") against the typological prototype of an interjection, feature by feature, in phonology (7 features), morphology (2) and syntax (6), and scores the fit…
3. Towards a complex analysis of Wayihî + T constructions in Biblical Hebrew (2018)
   The full text is not in the library; this card rests on the repository's abstract, so the ideas are provisional.
4. Against Binarism, Simplicity, Neatness and Stasis: A Theoretical Prolegomenon to the Reality of Verbal Grams in Biblical Hebrew (2017)
   A theoretical paper from cognitive linguistics and complexity theory. Its claim: models of the Biblical Hebrew verb that assign each form one binary value (perfective vs imperfective, past vs non-past) are "folk" models that, like perceptual illusions, add order that is not in the data. Instead the author proposes…
5. To resume or not to resume: Some remarks on 'resumption' in left dislocation constructions in Polish, and its relevance for Biblical Hebrew (2016)
   Part of a 2015 Stellenbosch workshop on left dislocation (LD) in Biblical Hebrew, where one camp holds that LD needs a resumptive pronoun (otherwise it is "extreme topicalisation") and the other treats resumption as a prototype feature that may be missing.
6. The Complexity of Verbal Semantics — An Intricate Relationship Between Qatal and Wayyiqtol (2016)
   The author reviews four traditional views of how qatal and wayyiqtol relate (identical, opposed, unrelated, similar but distinct) and replaces them with a frequency-weighted "kinetic map" of each form's senses.
7. Toward the Ocean of the Biblical Hebrew Verbal System (2015)
   The paper lifts the author's semantic-map approach from single verb forms to the whole system. Each form is placed on a cross-linguistic grammaticalization path, with its senses weighted by frequency ("waves"): qatal and wayyiqtol on the resultative path (resultative → perfect → perfective past), yiqtol (ongoing →…
8. An Optative Indicative? A Real Factual Past? Toward a Cognitive-Typological Approach to the Precative Qatal (2013)
   One of the author's series on rare senses of qatal. About 98% of qatal uses are indicative (perfect, past, stative), but some twenty cases, mostly in the Psalms, express a wish or a command: "Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me (qatal) from the horns of the wild oxen" (Ps 22:22). In the clear cases the…
9. Making It Sound: The Performative Qatal and Its Explanation (2012)
   Qatal is sometimes used not to report an act but to perform it at the moment of speaking: "I give you the field" (Gen 23:11), "I swear by myself", "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today" (Deut 4:26; 30:19), "I declare to you today" (Deut 26:3; 30:18).
10. Biblical Hebrew Wayyiqtol: A Dynamic Definition (2011)
    The paper argues that wayyiqtol cannot be reduced to one label ("past", "perfective", or "the narrative mainline form").
11. The Panchronic Yiqtol: Functionally Consistent and Cognitively Plausible (2010)
    Synchronically the long yiqtol looks chaotic: present progressive and habitual, aspect-neutral future, past habitual and past imperfective, simple past after אָז, relative future after טֶרֶם, many modal senses, and background in narrative but foreground in speech.

Co-authors (3)

• Irina Hornea
• Josh Westbury
• Marcus Joubert

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