The Ancient Egyptian Second Infinitive? ‘iw + subject + r + infinitive’ Interpreted Through the Biblical Infinitive Absolute and the Polish Second Infinitive

Abstract

Infinitives and infinitival constructions seem to be a kind of conceptualization embedded in a language with a ‘genus’ different to that of other grammatical forms. But why did human cognition invent infinitives and their associated constructions? On an ontological level, infinitives indicate intentionality that is pro-modal and timeless future-situationoriented (Prokopowicz 2012). Timeless future orientation expresses accomplishment or achievement, which are different states of perfectivity. If verbal finished forms direct our attention to the complexity of events, which we can for instance classify and express in ‘eventive’ sentences, infinitival forms draw our attention to situations (for a different context, see Borghouts 2010: ‘situative clauses’; Prokopowicz 2012: ‘quality, state, activity, event vs situation’). Situations are more complex than events as they involve a speaker with varying intentions, as well as the cotext of this speaker’s expression. Infinitival forms are less sentence-projected and more discourse-projected. All of this research has an obvious hermeneutical background. If something is expressed syntactically in one language, it may as well be expressed morphologically or semantically in other languages.

Keywords

• infinitival forms
• discource-projection
• aspectuality
• Egyptian grammar