Situation Aspect, (UN)Boundedness and The Participial Periphrastic Construction in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract

Abstract This paper provides a comprehensive and uniform description that accounts for the use of all the participial periphrastic constructions in Biblical Hebrew and calls into question the claim that a second (‘preterite’) function of the construction was developed in Late Biblical Hebrew. We define the syntagm and give criteria for distinguishing true participial periphrastic constructions from superficially similar constructions. We then show that close attention to situation aspect and (un)boundedess provides a unified and sound account of every occurrence of the syntagm in the Hebrew Bible. We conclude that, unless the situation is bounded by an adverbial phrase, every participial periphrastic construction is unbounded which semantically distinguishes the construction from wayyiqtol.