An Old Argument in New Garb: John Cook on Aspect and Biblical Hebrew

Cook’s tome on time and the Biblical Hebrew verb is a welcome compendium of research on the finite verbs within Biblical Hebrew. The breadth of his research is evident in his copious references and notes, which make the book valuable simply as a reference. His first chapter has “primers” on tense, aspect, and modality, beginning with Greek and Latin relative tense versus aspect theories. He then moves on to scholarship on the Biblical Hebrew verbal system, his own semantic analysis, and finally his approach to discourse analysis. His conclusions are traditional yet given a full, linguistic semantic foundation: the fundamental opposition in the Biblical Hebrew verbal system is of aspect, with qatal a perfective (and former perfect) and yiqtol an imperfective. Nearly everything else flows from this.

1. Chapter One: A Theory of Tense, Aspect and Modality

Cook’s appreciation for the literature in the field is demonstrated in his meticulous “primers” on tense, aspect, and modality. He begins with a primer on tense as understood within the R-point theory, from Greek and Latin theories through Reichenbach’s seminal work, which introduced the R (reference) point, and then Reichenbach’s successors who developed reference points into intervals and frames. Cook documents how the use of reference points to define verbal tenses revolutionized tense theory, serving admirably well to define exactly what each tense means, including the phenomena of tense shifting. Nonetheless, the theories foundered at explaining the inventory of tenses that languages have. Though elegant theories, providing clear and simple definitions for each tense, yet they failed to provide a rationale for which tenses exist and which do not. Though Cook does not provide an explicit rationale, it is vital for him that a theory explain all the verb forms available in a given language and only those which occur: no more, no less.

In his primer on aspect, Cook defines “situation aspect” as the aspect inherent to a verbal predicate, such as stativity or telicity. Cook praises the two-feature chart of Rothstein because it succeeds where the tense theories failed: all situation aspects can be defined as a unique combination of “stages” and telicity. States have no “stages” (because they are stative) and are atelic; actions have stages and are atelic; accomplishments have stages and are telic; and achievements have no stages and are telic. Thus, the two features provide for nothing extraneous: the inventory of situation types exactly matches the possibilities within the system. Unfortunately, the idea of “stages” is in fact a combination of two features: the absence of stativity (for states) and the absence of instantaneousness (for achievements). The union of these two categories remains questionable, but Cook’s pleasure at matching feature sets and actual linguistic inventory is great.

Scholars after Reichenbach have largely agreed that the combination of S (speech time), E (event time) and R (reference point/interval) is capable of defining tense and aspect: tense is the relationship between S and R and aspect is the relationship between E and R. Discourse theory provides the context for R: the current contextual point within a discourse, as demonstrated by the time-honored “She got married and got pregnant” versus “She got pregnant and got married.” The reference point within the discourse, however small, determines the reference point for the next clause. At its simplest, perfective verbs/clauses move the reference point forward, while imperfective verbs/ clauses do not. The term “boundedness” captures the relevant distinction between the two: bounded events (whether perfective or coerced into boundedness by some other means) advance the reference point and unbounded events do not. Boundedness is a recurring theme for Cook, in particular with its relationship to temporal succession.

Following his review of the literature on tense, mood, and aspect, Cook provides his own theory, with temporality as the unifying factor. Events are understood as having...