The Wayyiqtol as 'Pluperfect': When and Why

What it is about

Normally a wayyiqtol moves the story forward, and a pluperfect ("had done") is said with a qatal after a fronted element. Collins asks whether a wayyiqtol alone, with no preceding qatal, can mean a pluperfect. He surveys Driver (who allowed it only at the start of a section), Waltke–O'Connor, Martin, Baker and Buth's "unmarked temporal overlay", and concludes that it can, when at least one of three conditions holds: (1) an anaphoric expression points back to an event already told; (2) the logic of the referents requires the event to precede the previous one; (3) the verb opens a section or paragraph. Applied to two disputed verses, the reading is rejected for 1 Sam 14:24 and accepted for Gen 2:19 (the animals "had been formed").

Ideas

I2. Condition 3 as a rule: a wayyiqtol directly after a paragraph mark or a וַיְהִי + time phrase does not inherit the "after the previous clause" relation.
I3. Collect the candidate verses Collins and Driver list (in the Torah, among others: Gen 2:2, 2:8, 2:19, 12:1, 26:18; Exod 4:19, 11:1, 18:2, 33:5; Lev 9:22; Num 1:47–49) as a small gold set for the event-order rule, with Collins's verdicts.
I4. Record in the grammar that the overlay reading is a licensed exception and say which condition licenses it in each listed verse.

For Mova

I1. A "wayyiqtol overlay" flag in the event reader: when a wayyiqtol repeats the lexeme of an earlier event in the same episode (condition 1), do not order it after the preceding event; mark the relation as overlay instead of next.

I1–I2 apply to the event chain built from the trees (the world reading of the Torah, and the wayyiqtol mainline in 09-discourse.md §1). I3 is a test set; I4 goes into languages/hbo/06-verb.md under wayyiqtol.

Cite

Cite as C. John Collins. 1995. The Wayyiqtol as 'Pluperfect': When and Why. Tyndale Bulletin.

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.53751/001c.30401

@article{collins1995wayyiqtol,
  title = {{The Wayyiqtol as 'Pluperfect': When and Why}},
  author = {C. John Collins},
  journal = {Tyndale Bulletin},
  year = {1995},
  doi = {10.53751/001c.30401},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.53751/001c.30401}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/collins-1995-wayyiqtol-pluperfect-why/

📄 The Wayyiqtol as 'Pluperfect': When and Why

What it is about

Ideas

For Mova

Cite

The Wayyiqtol as 'Pluperfect': When and Why