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 (the dictionary builder, languages/hbo/10-lexicon.md) as an aspect field; I2 into languages/hbo/06-verb.md (stative verbs, qatal meaning) and into the English gloss and event reading behind tools/macula/src/prag.rs.

Topics Hebrew & Aramaic Semitic languages

Cite

Cite as Jun Sato. 2021. 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. TSpace (University of Toronto).

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 = {Jun Sato},
  booktitle = {TSpace (University of Toronto)},
  year = {2021},
  url = {http://hdl.handle.net/1807/107415}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sato-2021-semantic-ambiguity-so-called-stative/