[B-Greek] APOLUTRWSIS

Eddie Mishoe edmishoe at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 19 09:05:22 EST 2007


--- Barry <nebarry at verizon.net> wrote:

> Shall we follow Plato or Aristotle here?  "Innate"
> and "elephant" are both words 
> in English with quite restricted semantic ranges, so
> that your example really 
> doesn't relate.  Would you care to tell me what the
> innate meanings of the words 
> "run" and "scan" are in English? 

Both of you are right, in a sense. It is because of
these 'restricted semantic ranges" (or as Mitch calls
it, 'innate' senses) that 'run' and 'scan' have innate
meaning.

1. The water scanned down the hill. 

2. I ran the page just to get an idea of what to
expect.

What prevents 'scan' from being used in sentence 1?
Why is sentence 2 nonsense?

Mitch, yes, words do have innate meaning. That is why
words are not interchangeable in all contexts. You
were correct to observe their semantic domains and
nuances. It is because of their innate sense that
words are able to interact with a context before
introduced to the context. What I think others who
disagree mean is that we don't know what nuance in
which semantic domain is intended until it is used in
a particular context. But that is actually unrelated
to its innate lexical semantics. Because of its
innateness, we can use words metaphorically,
allegorically, etc. 

Mitch wrote:
> 
> > I seems silly to me, but having said that, I
> assume
> > this is a linguistic statement (that words don't
> have
> > innate meaning). So, could you explain what this
> > statement is suppose to mean?

Barry said:
> 
> It means that words don't have innate meaning, but
> only meaning in context. 
> With words that have a wide semantic range, what we
> think of as the "innate" or 
> "primary" meaning is usually the most common usage.

This is incorrect as stated. Context does not create
meaning for a lexeme. Context identifies which nuance
(within which semantic domain) is to be used. And this
is also why language has a serious limitations and
ambiguity, even in speech.

A truck used as a 'bullet' has no meaning unless
bullet has innate meaning and we are able to use one
of its innate senses metaphorically.



Eddie Mishoe
Pastor


 
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