What’s in a category?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “What’s in a category, a grammatical form by any other name would serve the same functions.” Andrason’s recent JHS article (here) and Randall Buth’s response/review of it (here) have me thinking again about categories. Randall has been quite vocal in critiquing the traditional approach to the Hebrew verb (e.g., see the discussion at Hobbin’s blog), which has revolved around the question of whether they express tense, aspect, or mood/modality, which he calls “over-simplistic labels.” Rather, he claims, “the Hebrew yiqtol conjugation can be a Tense and an Aspect and a Mood as the situation demands.” This is because tense-aspect-mood/modality (TAM) are intertwined within verb forms. The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) makes the same point in its introductory entry on tense-aspect:

“An alternative to seeing tense, aspect and mood as grammatical categories in the traditional sense is to regard tense-aspect-mood systems as wholes where the building-blocks are the individual tenses, aspects, and moods, such as the Past and the Progressive in English. These will be referred to as grams, and it is assumed that on the cross-linguistic level they represent a restricted set of gram types.” (here).

Verbs in Habakkuk 3

The theophanic vision report in Habakkuk 3* contains variations among verb forms that seem to defy explanation. For some scholars the solution is simply to ignore the variation. For example, note the treatment of the verb tense-aspect-mood (TAM) in some major English versions/ translations of the vision report of 3:3–15 (comprising 32 verb forms in all): NRSV, NIV, and NKJV translate all the verbs with past forms; while the REB, NAB and JB use mostly present verbs; and the NASB and NLT both show a split between present verbs in verses 3–7 as past verbs in verses 8–15. Recently de Regt (2008: 92) argued for a future temporal reference for the verbs vision based on treating the Perfects as “prophetic perfects.”