Future Values of the Qatal and Their Conceptual and Diachronic Logic: How to Chain Future Senses of the Qatal to the Core of Its Semantic Network

Abstract

The present paper demonstrates that various prospective values displayed by the Biblical Hebrew qatal are logical—both conceptually and diachronically—components of the total meaning offered by the Biblical Hebrew suffix conjugation. By employing a chaining procedure based on typologically plausible tendencies or—under a stronger assumption—universal evolutionary scenarios (i.e., diachronic paths), the author shows that such senses as future perfect, simple future, prospective certainty, or inevitability, future imminence and near future, present about-ness as well as “almost” and counterfactual present perfects are related to and fully compatible with the remaining dominant semantic potential of the qatal (in particular, with its most common values: present perfect, perfective, and past). Namely, the two sets of senses (viz., the perfect-perfective-past domain and the prospective domain) can successfully be mapped and chained by making use of evolutionary rules that typically govern the grammatical life of resultative constructions (such as the Biblical Hebrew qatal ), that is, the anterior path and the future perfect path. Additionally, by means of the latter trajectory, it is possible to demonstrate that the elements of the prospective domain may likewise be ordered and interconnected—they simply correspond to consecutive stages of this typo-logically plausible evolutionary process.