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Making It Sound: The Performative Qatal and Its Explanation

What it is about

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). Grammars have treated this as an odd exception to qatal's perfective or past meaning. The paper sorts the biblical cases by Austin's five classes of performatives (expositive, exercitive, commissive, behabitive, verdictive) and finds at least nineteen verbs, so the use is not rare. It then places the performative sense on the typological resultative-to-past path, just after the resultative stage: young and old perfects keep it only for a few typical performative verbs, past tenses lose it. That fits qatal as an old perfect, and explains why wayyiqtol (further along the path) never has it.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 is a candidate rule for tools/macula/src/prag.rs (act column; the existing promise rule covers part of the commissive class), measured with --with/--without. I2 is a count for The verb (qatal) and 09-discourse.md (speech acts). I4 goes into the Torah dictionary (10-lexicon.md).

Topics: Speech act theory

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs.2012.v12.a8

@article{andrason2012making,
  title = {{Making It Sound: The Performative Qatal and Its Explanation}},
  author = {Andrason, Alexander},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 12},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs.2012.v12.a8},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2012.v12.a8}
}

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