Semantic Ambiguity of So-Called "Stative Verbs" in Biblical Hebrew: Beyond Active vs. Stative Binary Opposition for the Qatal and Qatil Forms in the Qal Stem

What it is about

The full text is not in our library; this card rests on the repository abstract. Grammars set Qal qatal (active, "fientive") against qatil/qatul (stative), yet many qatil/qatul verbs denote events, not states, which has long "troubled Hebraists" (abstract). Using lexical-aspect theory (Rothstein), the thesis sorts every qatil/qatul predicate into states, activities, achievements and accomplishments, and shows how participles, directive-volitive moods, narrative sequence and punctual modifiers shift a stative verb to a dynamic reading. Diachronically it argues that an older stative function and a newer perfect function coexisted in the Northwest Semitic suffix conjugation, the stative being a remnant of the Proto-Semitic verbal adjective. Ideas are provisional.

Ideas

• I1. Give each Qal qatil/qatul lemma in the Torah dictionary a default aktionsart (state / activity / achievement / accomplishment), and list the contextual shifters (wayyiqtol, imperative, punctual time adverb) that move it to an event reading; e.g. a stative like "be heavy" or "be old" read as "became …" in wayyiqtol.
• I2. In glossing and in the world, read a stative verb in wayyiqtol as an inchoative event ("grew old", "became strong"), and in bare qatal as a present or resulting state; check the rule against JPS 1917 on the Torah's stative lemmas.

For Mova

I1 goes into the Torah dictionary (macula dict, The lexicon) as an aspect field; I2 into The verb (stative verbs, qatal meaning) and into the English gloss and event reading behind tools/macula/src/prag.rs.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{sato2021semantic,
  title = {{Semantic Ambiguity of So-Called "Stative Verbs" in Biblical Hebrew: Beyond Active vs. Stative Binary Opposition for the Qatal and Qatil Forms in the Qal Stem}},
  author = {Sato, Jun},
  booktitle = {TSpace (University of Toronto)},
  year = {2021},
  url = {http://hdl.handle.net/1807/107415}
}

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