Toward the Ocean of the Biblical Hebrew Verbal System

What it is about

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 → habitual → future → modal) and the participle qotel (ongoing → habitual → future) on the imperfective path, and weqatal (non-modal → semi-modal → modal) and short yiqtol, the jussive (semi-modal → modal), on the modal-contamination path. The two forms on each path are combined into a "current" whose peaks show the semantic domains that the pair covers: taxis and perfective past for the resultative current, habitual and future for the imperfective, semi-modal and modal for the modal one; the three currents together form the system, the "ocean". The paper is programmatic, with figures but no new counts, and the author calls it a first step.

Ideas

• I1. Use the paper's six path statements as the default sense order for each form when Mova glosses a verb: try the senses in path order and let context choose (e.g. yiqtol: ongoing in a participle-like context, habitual in a past-iterative chain, future in speech, modal after a volitive or in a command). The order gives a deterministic tie-break that can be explained.
• I2. Present the verb system in the manual as three pairs on three paths (qatal/wayyiqtol, yiqtol/qotel, weqatal/jussive), with Torah counts for each form, as one of the views in the aspect–tense debate.

For Mova

I1 is a rule order for verb glosses in the Torah dictionary's examples and for the tense of events in the world read from the trees; it pairs with I2 of the Andrason 2017 card (hbo-2026-andrason-against-binarism-simplicity-neatness-stasis), which supplies the frequencies. I2 is text for The verb (the aspect–tense debate). No measurement in the paper itself.

Cite

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

@inproceedings{andrason2026toward,
  title = {{Toward the Ocean of the Biblical Hebrew Verbal System}},
  author = {Andrason, Alexander},
  booktitle = {Folia Orientalia},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/7021}
}

References

32 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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