28.2321, Review: Akkadian; Arabic; Hebrew; Ancient Hebrew; Indo-European; Morphology; Syntax: Edzard (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2321. Thu May 25 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2321, Review: Akkadian; Arabic; Hebrew; Ancient Hebrew; Indo-European; Morphology; Syntax: Edzard (2016)

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Date: Thu, 25 May 2017 11:28:56
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: The Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Encoding of Tense and Aspect in Semitic

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-4026.html

EDITOR: Lutz  Edzard
TITLE: The Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Encoding of Tense and Aspect in Semitic
SUBTITLE: Proceedings of the Erlangen Workshop on April 26, 2014
SERIES TITLE: Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 104
PUBLISHER: ISD, Distributor of Scholarly Books
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

“The Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Encoding of Tense and Aspect in Semitic”,
edited by Lutz Edzard, represents the proceedings of a one-day workshop held
in 2014 at Erlangen in Franconia.  It contains six papers; some (co-)authors
are based in Germany, others in Semitic-speaking countries, and Silje Susanne
Alvestad in Norway.  (Two papers presented at Erlangen are not included here
because their authors had other publication plans.)

For description of Semitic languages, the area of tense, aspect, and modality
(TAM) is not just one structural issue among others but a central problem.  In
a recent Linguist List review
(https://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-2171.html), I explained how Biblical
Hebrew (BH) has two contrasting verb conjugations, often called “prefix” and
“suffix” conjugations from the differing position of affixes marking
person/number/gender of subject, which clearly express a range of contrasts in
the TAM area but where (despite the intensive study to which that language has
been subjected over centuries) it often remains unclear and controversial why
a given conjugation is chosen in a particular context.  This might be said to
rank as the leading problem of BH linguistics.  BH is the only Semitic
language of which I have detailed knowledge, but Gideon Goldenberg confirms
(2013: 202) that the issue is problematic for the West Semitic languages in
general, despite many differences between the verbal systems of the individual
languages.  (“West Semitic” covers all Semitic languages other than Akkadian.)
 One might think that difficulty in describing this issue in BH stems from the
impossibility of consulting its speakers, but several contributors here make
it clear that essentially the same problem arises with present-day Semitic
languages.

The individual contributions to Edzard’s book are as follows.  (I translate
the titles of two papers written in German.)  Since the contributions vary
greatly in length, I include page counts.

Michael Streck, “Temporal adverbs in Akkadian” (13 pp.), points out that TAM
contrasts can be expressed either by verb inflexions or by adverbs, and says
that the latter have been neglected in the study of Akkadian:  Streck offers
an initial analysis.  Part of his paper relates to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis:
 the fact that adverbs expressing past and future often derive from roots for
‘front’ and ‘back’ respectively has led some Assyriologists to describe
Akkadian speakers as “walking backwards through time”, but this is a
misunderstanding of the logic of these forms.

Silje Susanne Alvestad and Lutz Edzard, “Aspect in the Biblical Hebrew
imperative from a modern Slavic perspective” (31 pp.), discuss seeming
anomalies in the inflexions used in various Biblical passages expressing
negative commands (i.e. prohibitions).  One variant of the BH prefix
conjugation gives a “jussive” rather than indicative sense, e.g. ‘you (m. sg.)
bring’ is “tashib” in the indicative but “tasheb” in the jussive.  The
language has two negative particles, “lo’ ” and “al”, and prohibitions are
commonly expressed either as “al” + jussive or as “lo’ ” + indicative. 
(Weingreen 1959: 115 explains the difference as ‘don’t do it (now)’ versus
‘don’t ever do it’, respectively.  For instance, the Ten Commandments use the
lo’ structure.)  In certain cases, though, we find the opposite combinations
of particle with inflexion.  Some Hebraists have treated this as a matter of
loose usage, and (since the jussive/indicative contrast is realized as a
difference in vowels, which were indicated in writing only late in the history
of Hebrew) others have taken the anomalous combinations for scribal errors. 
Alvestad and Edzard believe they may be non-erroneous and systematic, and they
use a comparison with Slavonic languages (whose verbs systematically contrast
perfective and imperfective aspects) to develop a hypothesis about what lies
behind the “anomalies”.

Norah Boneh, “Some thoughts on grammatical aspect in Modern Hebrew” (27 pp.),
points out that Modern Hebrew can be seen as having three “tenses”, expressed
by prefix and suffix conjugations and by a participle form used predicatively.
 Setting aside the prefix conjugation, used in Modern Hebrew in modal and
future senses, Boneh notes that a 2010 Amsterdam PhD thesis by Nurit Dekel
uses corpus data to argue that the contrast between suffix conjugation and
participle expresses a distinction of aspect (respectively perfective and
imperfective), without specification of tense.  Boneh argues to the contrary
that the primary use of this contrast is to express a time distinction, past
versus present, though there are also secondary aspect connotations.  The
difference between the grammatical concepts “tense” and “aspect” can itself be
rather obscure, but Boneh uses ideas derived from Reichenbach (1947) to define
the terms in a precise and language-independent fashion.

Melanie Hanitsch, “On the path through the lexicon: thoughts about the history
of the interaction between grammatical and lexical aspect in Modern Arabic”
(28 pp.), sets off from the observation that a leading contrast between older
forms of Arabic, including Classical Arabic, and the various modern dialects
is that the latter have adopted a range of verbal modifiers, often auxiliary
verbs, expressing TAM senses.  For instance, in many varieties of Modern
Arabic a word “ ‘ammāl” or a reduced form of it, i.e. ‘doer, doing’, is added
to a main verb to indicate progressive action.  Hanitsch quotes David Cohen as
describing a cyclical process in the history of Arabic dialects whereby a
periphrastic construction arises in order to express a particular TAM sense,
causing the simple form to be restricted to the complementary sense, but later
the new construction is extended to the full sense-range originally covered by
the simple form, and later still another new construction arises to express
the more specific sense and the earlier periphrastic form is itself restricted
to the complementary sense.

Hanitsch traces in detail the paths by which various originally lexical verbs
have been grammaticalized in this way in different Arabic dialects.  She
argues that main-verb senses can be assigned locations in a two-dimensional
space with respect to their propensity to enter new periphrastic
constructions.

Salah Fakhry, “Tense, aspect, and modality in Baghdad Arabic” (24 pp.),
describes the verbal system of the Arabic of present-day Baghdad.  As well as
simple prefix conjugation, simple suffix conjugation, and participle, he lists
five auxiliary + suffix-conjugation combinations and fourteen auxiliary +
prefix-conjugation combinations.  For each of these 22 alternatives Fakhry
shows whether its sense relates to tense-and-aspect or to modality,
illustrating that sense or range of senses from corpus examples.  Like Nora
Boneh, Fakhry uses Reichenbach’s approach in order to define TAM senses
precisely.

Finally, Ronny Meyer, “Aspect and tense in Ethiosemitic languages” (81 pp.),
examines TAM-related phenomena in the Semitic languages of Ethiopia and
Eritrea (including Amharic, Gǝ‘ǝz, Tigré, Tigrinya, the languages collectively
referred to as Gurage, and others).  Much of Meyer’s long contribution
examines the evolution of the verb forms in different lines of descent from a
common Proto-Semitic ancestor language.  But later in the chapter he moves on
to discussing the semantics of the alternative forms.  Previous scholars have
disagreed about whether individual Ethiosemitic languages are primarily
aspect-based or tense-based.  Meyer concludes that “the two core conjugations
in the indicative mood denote viewpoint aspect, but not tense nor relative
tense”.  (He contrasts “viewpoint aspect” with so-called Aktionsart, the
latter referring to the inherent nature of a predicate, e.g. state, action, or
process, while the former refers to the feature of a situation foregrounded by
an utterance, e.g. its beginning/end or the phase between its implicit
starting and ending points.)

A distinctive feature of almost all Ethiosemitic languages, not found in the
rest of the Semitic family, is what Meyer (following Hans Jürgen Polotsky and
Robert Hetzron) calls “converbs”:  dependent verbs used for adverbial
modification and in narrative-clause chaining.  Converb constructions are
thought to have arisen in the Ethiosemitic subfamily through contact with
neighbouring languages of the Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan families, most of
which possess converbs.  The fact that converb forms in different Ethiosemitic
languages do not appear all to share the same origin makes the contact
explanation particularly plausible.

EVALUATION

Gideon Goldenberg remarked in his 2013 book that there continues to be “a
constant flux of publications” on the topic of the book reviewed here.  This
book will not bring that stream of scholarly discussion and debate to a close,
but it is an extremely useful contribution to it.  The book is particularly
commendable for the way that it brings together expertise on a wide range of
Semitic languages, both Asian and African, and on present-day colloquial
speech as well as ancient writings; and for the efforts contributors make to
analyse the cloudy phenomena of TAM in precise terms independent of the
philological traditions of individual languages.

Even linguists with no special interest in the Semitic family should be
fascinated to see how essentially the same intractable descriptive problem
recurs over thousands of miles of territory and thousands of years of time.  I
can think of no close parallel to this in the Indo-European family.

Few books are flawless, of course, and this one is not the exception.  It is
marred by a moderately high incidence of editorial oversights.  Some are
trivial, e.g. “have certainly be aware”, “the the discussion”, “at-tested”
(all in one paragraph on p. 22), “Fäbung” for “Färbung”, etc.  More
troublesome are cases where it is not obvious whether the text as it stands is
incorrect, or whether variation among technical terms is meaningful.  Page 57
has a passage turning on the mathematical contrast between inclusion and
proper inclusion, but the symbol for (general) inclusion is used where proper
inclusion is intended.  Nora Boneh’s morpheme-by-morpheme example glosses
repeatedly give the Hebrew root t-p-r as ‘sow’, though her translations
correctly give it as ‘sew’.  Since Semitic verbs are inflected by varying the
vowels between the unchanging consonants of a root, it is usual to identify a
particular inflexion by inserting the relevant vowels in a standard root – for
BH normally p-‘-l, ‘do’.  Melanie Hanitsch’s Table 1 uses the Arabic
equivalent,  f-‘ l, but on the facing page she uses k t-b, ‘write’.  The
unwary reader wonders whether there is significance in this contrast, but I
believe there is not.  Likewise Nora Boneh’s morpheme-by-morpheme glosses seem
to use ‘SUFF-V’ and ‘PAST’ interchangeably to denote suffix conjugation. 
Boneh certainly knows a very great deal more than I do about Hebrew, so I
spent a long time trying to discover a meaningful basis behind this variation,
but I could not find one.  If Boneh is using the tense name PAST to stand for
“suffix conjugation”, this creates a regrettable appearance of assuming what
she claims to be demonstrating.

When Alvestad and Edzard introduce the BH jussive inflexion, their first
example is the word for ‘bless you’ at Numbers 6:24, “The Lord bless you and
keep you”.  They transliterate it into phonetic notation corresponding to IPA
[jǝva:rexxa:].  A sequence -xx- would be phonologically exceptional in BH; the
point below the first [x] letter is an ambiguous symbol, and I wonder whether
it should not be read here as vocal shwa, [jǝva:rexǝxa:].

Contributors sometimes assume pieces of knowledge that may have been common to
the workshop participants but will not necessarily be familiar to a wider
readership.  Nora Boneh has a term “futurate” which is evidently not quite the
same thing as “future”, and in addition to Reichenbach’s symbols for tense
analysis she introduces “P” for “perspective time”, in each case glossing the
terms only via literature citations.  It would have been helpful to include
brief wording giving at least a broad-brush understanding of the terminology.

Most contributions are admirably empirical.  I was startled, though, to read
in Nora Boneh’s concluding section that “The theoretical framework endorsed
here forces there to be a grammatical aspect category even in a language that
does not morphologically mark the distinction.”  I had not noticed any earlier
statement of such a theoretical commitment, and I was left wondering how it
affected the substance of the debate between Boneh and Nurit Dekel.

Like so many books published in Continental Europe, this one contains no
index.

But it is a reviewer’s task, or part of it, to nit-pick.  The issues I have
listed do not negate my assessment that Edzard’s volume is a very worthwhile
publication.  Anyone interested in its topic will want to read it.

REFERENCES

Goldenberg, G.  2013.  Semitic Languages: features, structures, relations,
processes.  Oxford University Press.

Reichenbach, H.  1947.  Elements of Symbolic Logic.  Macmillan (London).

Weingreen, J.  1959.  A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew, 2nd edn. 
Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in
1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at
Yale University before teaching at the universities of Oxford, LSE, Lancaster,
Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he spent
some years as a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of South
Africa. Sampson has published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of
other subjects. His most recent book is a new edition of ''Writing Systems''
(Equinox, 2015).





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