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Against Binarism, Simplicity, Neatness and Stasis: A Theoretical Prolegomenon to the Reality of Verbal Grams in Biblical Hebrew

What it is about

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 his wave-stream model: each verbal form (gram) is a network of senses lying along a known cross-linguistic path of development (the "anterior" path: resultative → perfect → perfective past → simple past), with each sense weighted by its frequency, so the profile looks like a wave. On his earlier Genesis counts, wayyiqtol is about 90% perfective past, 8% non-perfective past and 4% perfect-like senses, and 94.5% of its tokens are in narrative; qatal is spread over perfect senses (up to about 33%), past, future-perfect, performative and others, and splits evenly between discourse (48%) and narrative (47.5%). Wayyiqtol is the more advanced wave on the path, qatal the less advanced one.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 is a count on the Torah trees (verb form × prag voice) for The verb (the aspect–tense debate). I2 is a rule set for the gloss of verbs in the Torah dictionary's examples and for the event layer read from the trees. I3 is a measure against the JPS 1917 alignment, reported in 06-verb.md with its date.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{andrason2026against,
  title = {{Against Binarism, Simplicity, Neatness and Stasis: A Theoretical Prolegomenon to the Reality of Verbal Grams in Biblical Hebrew}},
  author = {Andrason, Alexander},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/6760}
}

References

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