Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
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lent to an adjective in a nominal clause. For most semanthemes, however, this nominal perfect in Classical Hebrew developed into a perfect
in the European sense, a post-terminal in the present with at least some
focality. In later Hebrew and already in Classical Arabic the perfect
went further in the process to a straightforward non-focal non-post-terminal historical verb form in narrative texts, just as the perfect in
southern German.
The imperfect in Hebrew and Arabic is the verbal conjugation used
for the focal intra-terminal so-called "progressive" reading. However,
the focality of the imperfect is often neutralized to express future or
modal shades of meaning.
The big problem in Classical Hebrew is the functional analysis of
the so-called "consecutive tenses" or "converted tenses", in which the
two basic conjugations mentioned above miraculously seem to take on
the opposite functions just by the prefixation of the conjunction wa-l
we- (< Proto-Semitic *wa-) 'and'. Prefixation of wa- to the imperfect
yiq-ol results in the "imperfect consecutive" wayyiq-ol, which constitutes the historical narrative verb form par prfrence. In numerous
textbooks3 the imperfect consecutive is said to "continue" a perfect,
adopting its temporal or aspectual value.
Prefixation of we- to the perf. q#-al results in the "perfect consecutive" weq#-al, capable of continuing an imperfect with apparently no
change of meaning.
I shall not further elaborate on the Semitic verbal aspects. What has
been stated above is intended only to serve as a background for the following examples from Classical Hebrew.
2. Classical Hebrew
In the narrative from the opening of the Book of Job, a dubitative indirective is expressed by two post-terminal Hebrew perfects, Job 1:5:
(1)
kl 'amar
lyyb 'lay
hf'-
b#n-ay
for PRF-said-he Job: perhaps PRF-have-sinned-they sons-my,
'For Job said: Maybe my sons have sinned
385
-befk-
'Hhlm bi-lb#b-#m
and-PRF-have-offended-they God
in-heart-their
and offended God in their hearts.'
'lay
mi!g h'
perhaps mistake it
'Maybe it was a mistake.'
A doubt about a historical event is expressed by a stative simple nominal clause introduced by the dubitative particle lay. h' is the 3 pers.
mase. sing, personal pronoun. In Joshua 9:7 (3) and Lamentations 3:29
(4) a nominal clause receives a nuance of doubt by being prefixed by
lay:
(3)
'lay
be-qirb-
'att# ysb
perhaps in-vicinity-my MS-you PART-live
'Perhaps you live near me [and not, as you allege, far away].'
'lay
ys tiqw#
perhaps EXT hope
'Perhaps there is still hope.'
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the verb, or 2) a simple nominal clause. And the two constructions are
not exhaustive, of course. The dubitative particle "lay is capable of
attaching a nuance of doubt to every Hebrew proposition. However, an
evidential reading may be expressed without special particles, as the
inferential meaning in Genesis 28:6 shows:
(5)
wa-y-yaf
'sw kl
brak
and-iPFC-he-saw Esau that PRF-has-blessed-he
'Then Esau realized that: Isaac has blessed
'et
YcCqb we-!illah
't Paden-(
ACC Jacob
and-PRF-has-sent-he him Padan-LOC
Jacob and sent him to Padan Aram
Yi"h#q
Isaac
Ar#m
Aram
l#-qahat
l-
mi!-!am
'i!!a
for-iNF-taking to-him from-there wife
to take a wife from there'.
387
we-l' he'emant
la-d-d'b#rim
'ad '"!er b't
but-not pRF-believed-I for-DET-words until that PRF-had-come-I
'But I did not believe the reports until I had come
wa-t-ti'na
'n-ay
w'-hinn l' huggad
l-i
and-iPFC-saw-they eyes-my and-behold not PRF-had-been-told to-me
and my own eyes saw: Behold, not even half had been told to me!'
ha-hs
DET-half
The queen of Sheba visited king Solomon, and when she saw his splendour with her own eyes she realized with astonishment that she had
been misinformed. The particle hinn is followed by the Hebrew perfect in the passive, huggad 'has/had been reported'. We may infer that
after hinn a post-terminal easily takes on an inferential meaning as in
many other languages. This is illustrated by a few more examples below. 1 Samuel 30:3:
(7)
wa-y-y#bo'
D#widwa-"n#s-#w
'el-h#-r
and-iPFC-came-he David and-men-his to-DET-city
'David and his men came to the city, and behold,
w1-hinn
and-behold
s'mf#
b#-es u-n'i-hem
u-b'n-hem
FS-PASS-PART-burned in-fire and-wives-their and-sons-their
it (is/was) burned down, and their wives and sons
-b'nt-hem
ni!bu
wa-y-yi!!(
D#wd
and-daughters-their PRF-has-been-taken-captive and-iPFC-lifted-he David
and daughters were taken captive! Then David
w'-h#-'#m
'"!er 'itt-
'et-ql-m
and-DET-people which with-him Acc-voice-their
and his men lifted up their voice and wept.'
wa-y-yibk
and-iPFC-wept-they
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there. The fire is probably not even burning anymore. Yet, what has
happened is immediately clear to the men of David. The wives and the
children are not present before their eyes, yet their state of being captive is inferred from the sight of the burned city. In this example the
inferential marker hinn is followed first by a nominal clause consisting of the adjective serf 'burned' (passive participle) + the adverbial
phrase b#-es 'in fire', then secondly by a further inference expressed
by the Hebrew perfect nisb '(they) have been taken captive'.
The particle hinn together with its short form hen occurs 1,157
times in the Old Testament, and I would propose that it must be regarded as the foremost inferential marker in the Hebrew language, although it does not introduce inferential readings in every occurrence.
It should be pointed out that hinn is not a marker of the primary
orientation point (Os), that is, of the orientation point of the speech
act. Instead, it is a macro-syntactic4 sign used in a narrative to emphatically create a deictic centre of its own, somewhere in the text world,
that is, in the localization point (0 L or O2). The effect of the particle
hinn is that the chain of events in the main narrative thread is interrupted, a dissociation is introduced, and the following text is marked
as an impression of some kind, not necessarily visual.5 In this example
the narrative chain is represented by the non-focal or, at most, lowfocal so-called "imperfect conscutives", wa-y-y#bo\ wa-y-yiss#\
wa-y-yibk, being non-post-terminal past verbal items. The narrative
chain is interrupted by the macro-syntactic marker hinn that in fact
has two functions: firstly, it marks the following post-terminal clauses
as a description of an impression; secondly, by emphatically pointing
to the localization point in the text world, it marks the same clauses as
a whole to be part of the larger narrative web, which is continued
by the non-post-terminal items wa-y-yi!!( 'and lifted up' and wa-yyibk 'and wept'. We could say that hinn as a macro-syntactic marker
tells the reader or listener, "Be watchful now, the narrative chain is
being interrupted by an impression, but only temporarily, it will soon
be continued!". In this function hinn is similar to another frequent
macro-syntactic marker in Classical Hebrew, namely wayhi with a
temporal clause, which is used to mark a circumstantial temporal
clause as part of a larger narrative unit. However, wayhi does not seem
389
w#-'#qum
ba-b-boqer
lr-hnq
and-iPFC-I-went-up in-DET-morning for-iNF-nursing
'I got up in the morning to nurse my son,
'et-ben
ACC-son-my
w'-hinne met
and-behold dead
and behold: he was dead.'
wa-y-yb'
Mm ha-g-Gib'#t-#,
we-hinn
and-iPFC-arrived-they there DET-Gibeah-LOC, and-behold
'They arrived there at Gibeah, and behold:
hebel
n"bT-Im liqr't-
procession-csTR(of)
prophets against-him
a procession of prophets (was coming) against him.'
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Bo Isaksson
^ ^ *'<
..;;.
The proclitic interrogative particle ha- and the adverb gam 'also' express astonishment and a portion of doubt in spite of the direct evidence of seeing Saul prophesy together with the other already known
prophets. With hesitation, the people around have to infer from what
they see that Saul is also a prophet.
The particle hinn followed by a nominal clause is also capable of
expressing an inferential reading if the context signalizes that possibility, Genesis 41:7:
(11) way-y-qas
Para w'-hinn fflm
and-iPFC-he-woke up Pharao and-behold dream
'Then Pharaoh woke up (and realized): (It was) a dream.'
Pharaoh wakes up and opens his eyes and from what he sees he draws
the reasonable conclusion that what he had experienced was only a
dream, and this is expressed by only one word, the noun Iflm
'dream', after the presentative particle.
The ability of this powerful particle to mark a situation as being
Expressions ofevidentiality
391
present before the eyes of the observer, also makes it capable of expressing an imagined situation, be it a condition or supposition, as in
Genesis 50:5 (Brockelmann 1956: 4):
(12) hinn
'nkl met...
tiqb'r-n
Behold I
dead... iPF-you-shall-bury-me
'When I am dead, bury me ... '
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Bo Isaksson
The translation of this piece of text is by the field worker and editor
Bruce Ingham. Taken literally, the sentence says "Ibn 'Ura%ir, the day
his force came back to him, they had not caught al-Furaid". However,
the editor adds "he saw", because to achieve a topicalization the main
perceptive subject "Ibn TJrai'ir" has been put at the beginning of the
sentence (so-called absolute nominative). By this construction, the fact
that they had not caught al-Furaid becomes a matter of inference, seeing that his men are returning alone. For the inferential reading the Arabic perfect gdubaw 'they had caught' is used, in this case with postterminal meaning.
A case of reportive evidentiality is found in another text from the
same tribe (Ingham 1986: text 13).
(14) u
b(ad ga
hal-habar ba!!iro-h
g#law
inn
and then PRF-came DET-news good-news-his PRF-told-they that
'And then the news came to him and they brought him good news that
'.:
1l Dufir c#sb-n
u
l# 'al$-ham
I-DafTr PART-winners and not by-them
the Al-afr had won the battle and that there was nothing wrong with them.'
393
ilm
nidir
tigil
knowledge warning you-say
gayy-hum
!ayy
having-come-them something
or something.'
A speculative nuance is achieved here by repeating tigil 'you say' (Ingham 1994: 129). The construction with an active participle (gayyhum < active, part, g#yy + object suff. -hum) expressing inference is in
some respects similar to the examples of grammaticalized evidential
categories found in border area Arabic dialects in close contact with
Turkic languages. In Najdi Arabic an active participle of a verb with a
telic-action type of Aktionsart conveys the meaning of a state following the completion of an action (Ingham 1994: 90, 95). In the Adana
district of Turkey this internal capability of the Arabic participle has
developed to a full-fledged expression for reportive/inferential nuances due to the influence of surrounding Turkic vernaculars:8
(18) $hid-ha (= Turkish Onu almi")
PART-he-took-it(FS)
-, 394
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395
y# sayyid- 'akalta
dibsan
oh Sir-my PRF-have-eaten-you treacle
"Sir, you have been eating treacle!" 9
One of the students (b(du tal#mdi) notices traces of treacle (ace: dibsan) on the breast of his teacher (on his breast: 'aid sadri-hi) and from
that infers that he has previously eaten treacle. This past eating is not
presented per se, but is inferred from the result of the action, namely
the prima facie evidence of treacle on the chest. In this case the inferential is expressed by the Arabic perfect (you have been eating:
'akalta) without additional particle, which illustrates the semantic similarity between the perfect and the inferential, both categories presenting an event not in itself but via its results (Comrie 1976: 110).
3.3. Classical Arabic
Inference of indirect evidence can be expressed without any particle in
Arabic as well as Hebrew. Such an instance is found in a classical text
rendered by $akir al-Batlun in Kit#b Tasliya al-Haw#tir.10
(21) 'Id-i
'ntabaha
s-$#hibu Badru d-dini. Fa-lam yagid
suddenly PRF-woke-he Sahib Badr al-Dn.
And-not lPF-he-found
'Suddenly Sahib Badr al-Dn woke up and could not find
'ah-h,
fa-qma
faztan
wa-wagada
Acc-brother-his and-got-up-he fearful
and-PRF-found-he
his brother, so he got up fearful and found
'l-b#ba
'l-lad 'statraqa
min-hu mafthan
DET-ACC-door which PRF-escaped-he from-it Acc-open.
the doorthrough which he had escapedopen.
fa-q#la:
min hun# g#'a
!-!arrul
and-PRF-said-he: From here PRF-has-come-it DET-evil.
And he said: From here came the evil!'
By the sight of the open door, Sahib Badr al-Dn draws the conclusion
that something evil has happened to his brother. And this inference is
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expressed by the Arabic perfect g(a 'it has come', without additional
evidential particle.
The next example from Classical Arabic is taken from Abu 1-Farag
al-Isfahnfs Kit#b al-ag#ni, from the section about the pre-Islamic
poet Ta'abba!a $arran:11
(22) Q#la
la-hu qawmu-hu:
M# kun-ta
PRF-said-it to-him NOM-tribespeople-his: What PRF-were-you
'His fellow tribesmen said to him: What did you
mut(abbitan,
y# .#bitu? Q#la:
PART-wearing-under-arm oh 0'bit? PRF-Said-he:
wear under your arm, 0'bit? He said:
Al-Gla.
Qal:
La-qad ta'abba-ta
DET-desert-demon. PRF-Said-they: EMF
PRF-have-worn-under-arm-you
The desert demon. They said: You have really worn something evil under
!arran!
ACC-evil.
the arm!'
In this instance the astonished inference is emphasized by two emphatic particles, la- and qad, forming laqad, which particle is required
for the perfect to express an affirmative proposition. The emphatic proclitic particle la- alone is not permitted in this case (Wright [1975], II:
176 A).
Another example exhibiting a reportive reading is from the section about the Umayyad poet Qays ibn Darh (died 690) in Kit#b
al-'ag#n:12
(23) Dakara
'Brut 'A'isata 'anna-hu 'aq#ma
'al#
PRF-has-reported-he Ibn ''isa
that-he
PRF-remained-he on
'Ibn '3'isa has reported that he (Qays ibn Darlh) continued with
d#lika 'arba'Jna yawman. .umma -allaqa-h#.
Wa-h#d#
that
forty
day.
Then
PRF-has-he-divorced-her. But-this
this in 40 days. Then he (reportedly) divorced her. But this
397
laysa bi-"ahhin.
is-not in-(what is)true
is not true.'
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Bo Isaksson
9. This is told about 'Abu l-'Al' al-Ma'arr, a famous Arabic poet and philosopher
who lived 973-1057.
10. !kir al-Batln (1882: 138). The author-editor lived in Egypt and died 1477.
11. Abu 1-Farag al-Isfah'n (1957-62, vol. 21: 144). The author died 967.
12. Abu 1-Farag al-Isfah'n (1957-62, vol. 9: 178).
References
Abu 1-Farag al-Isfah'n
1957-62 Kit#b al-agn. 25 vols. Beirut: D'r al-0aq'fa.
Brockelmann, Carl
) !
1956
Hebrische Syntax. Neukirchen: Neukirchen Verlag.
Chikovani, Guram
forthcoming "The morphological system of the Qashqadaryan Arabic Dialect of
Central Asia", in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of
L'Association Internationale pour la Dialectologie Arabe, held on
Malta, 28 March - 2 April 1998. Malta.
Comrie, Bernard
1976
Aspect. An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. 1976. Reprinted with corrections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Fischer, Wolfdietrich
1961
"Die Sprache der arabischen Sprachinsel in Uzbekistan", Der Islam
36: 233-263.
Husain, Taha
1942
Al-Ayym. Cairo: Al-Maaref.
Ingham, Bruce
1986
Bedouin of Northern Arabia. Traditions of the Al-Dhar. London:
KPI.
1994
Najdi Arabic: Central Arabian. London Oriental and African Language Library, 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Isaksson, Bo
1998
" 'Aberrant' usages of introductory w'h#y# in the light of text linguistics", in: K.-D. SchunckM. Augustin (eds.), "Lasset uns Brcken
bauen...". Collected Communications to the XVth Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, Cambridge 1995. (Beitrge zur Erforschung des Alten Testaments und des
antiken Judentums, 42.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Johanson, Lars
1992
Strukturelle Faktoren in trkischen Sprachkontakten. Sitzungsberichte der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang
Goethe-Universitt Frankfurt am Main, 29:5. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
399
1996a
Abbreviations
Mmasculine, Ffeminine, ssingular, pplural, 3MSthird person masculine
singular, etc., ACCaccusative, CSTRconstruct state, DETdeterminative (definite) particle, EMFemphatic particle, EXTexistential particle, INFinfinitive,
IPF
imperfect, IPFCimperfect consecutive, LOClocative particle, PARTparticiple, PRFperfect, QUEquestion particle.