Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Hebrew Verbs and Aspect

"the perfective aspect looks at the situation from outside, without necessarily distinguishing any of the internal structure of the situation; the imperfective aspect looks at the situation from inside, and as such is crucially concerned with the internal structure of the situation."

The above is quoted from B. Comrie, Aspect. An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems (Cambridge, 1976) in this article from that set of online articles available here from JTS.

Doesn't that imply or confirm that when approaching a poem, both the internal structure (verbal cues, repetition, etc) must be included as well as the prosodic structure (externally visible form)?

That's a random obvious statement. I scanned this article - O for the day when my recognition of Hebrew is not mediated by slow brain paths - and I will read this article in detail later and see if there is anything that commends itself to my cilia and flagella. I think he is going to argue that without the expression of tense, aspect is not expressible... - Unknown ancient thought forms? And he doesn't deal with poetry - I know why I started with poetry - jump in to the maximum unknowns.

No comments: