The participle as a component of the verbal system in Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

The full text is not in the library; this card rests on the abstract (via OpenAlex), so the ideas are provisional. The active participle in Biblical Hebrew has nominal and adjectival uses, but in some contexts it is a verb, part of the verbal paradigm. In that role it carries meanings no other form can, above all the "real present": what is happening now, at the moment of speech. The paper illustrates the participle's main verbal functions and traces a line of syntactic change from the classical Hebrew of the monarchy (10th–7th c. BCE) to early post-biblical Hebrew (1st c. BCE), where the participle moves toward a general present tense.

Ideas

• I1. Classify each active participle in the trees as nominal (has the article or a construct dependent, heads a noun phrase), attributive, or predicative-verbal (predicate of a clause, often after הִנֵּה or a subject pronoun), and count the three over the Torah.
• I2. A rule for prag and the gloss: a predicative participle in direct speech, especially after הִנֵּה / הִנְנִי, is read as "real present" (English present progressive or immediate future), not as a past.
• I3. Chapter 12 can show the drift with one count: the share of predicative participles among finite-like predicates in the Torah versus in the Mishnah texts we hold.

For Mova

I1 is a feature for tools/macula (VerbForm=Part with a MISC role) and a section of The verb (participles). I2 is a candidate rule in tools/macula/src/prag.rs, measured against the JPS tenses. I3 belongs in 11-mishnaic.md and 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md (the participle-present).

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1163/18776930-20201001

@article{joosten2020participle,
  title = {{The participle as a component of the verbal system in Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Joosten, Jan},
  journal = {Brill s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.1163/18776930-20201001},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1163/18776930-20201001}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2020-joosten-participle-component-verbal-system-biblical/