[b-hebrew] b-hebrew Uncancellable meaning and Hebrew verbs

David Kummerow farmerjoeblo at hotmail.com
Thu Jun 25 21:02:59 EDT 2009




> Using your standard above, except applying it to me and the way I have
> heard and read the term, your examples are nonsense. Oxymoron. They do
> not communicate. To the people around me, you are Humpty Dumpty, willy
> nilly changing the meanings of words for your own purposes with no eye
> towards communicating to the world.

Karl, to me these examples do in fact communicate and it is clear what 
is meant in each use. It is not Humpty Dumpty English, but acceptable 
English in my part of the world.

> 
> The question then becomes, who is correct? Which use is the standard
> use that people can refer to for effective communication? When
> checking reference works from international sources, if they agreed
> with you, then I would have to reconsider my understanding of the term
> in order to communicate with the world at large. But they don’t.
> Without exception, all the reference works I consulted give a meaning
> that is consistent with what I hear, and at variance with yours.
> Therefore, I can conclude that your data is non-standard, dialectal,
> not only can be, but should be, ignored when dealing with standard
> usage (possibly mentioned in a footnote).

Sure it might be non-standard to you circles. That still doesn't mean 
that we can't ask the question: if semantics is meaning which 
uncancellable across the uses of a lexeme etc. in a language or dialect, 
what is the semantics of "plod" in such a dialect?

Really, this is just a case in point for me. I've raised numerous areas 
of language in my review where multifunctionality is the order of the 
day and where some so-called uncancellable meaning can not be discerned 
across the various uses. Of course, none of which Rolf has treated nor 
admits he's considered as part of my criticism of his approach.

> 
>  > Like I've
>  > repeatedly asked: what is the uncancellable meaning/semantics of "plod"
>  > for such people whose examples I listed are entirely acceptable?
> 
> Because we are dealing with non-standard, dialectal use, the question
> is irrelevant.

 From you point of view. Yet the question still remains: for those who 
see semantic meaning as uncencellable meaning, which is the semantics of 
"plod" in such a non-standard dialect (to use your terms)? If 
uncancellable meaning is supposed to exist, please show the 
uncancellable meaning of "plod" across the examples we've been considering.

> 
>  > At some
>  > point, the "uncancellable meaning" of "plod" that existed in your own
>  > so-called "international standard English" actually was cancelled -- and
>  > these days now to the point that the use does not sound "weird", is not
>  > poetic, is not some extreme use, etc. How can this occur if semantics is
>  > said to be uncancellable meaning? And what is the uncancellable meaning
>  > that is now the result? What is the "uncancellable meaning" of "plod"
>  > across the examples I gave?
>  >
> Your questions are nonsense, based on the above.

I repeat: From you point of view. Yet the question still remains: for 
those who see semantic meaning as uncencellable meaning, which is the 
semantics of "plod" in such a non-standard dialect (to use your terms)? 
If uncancellable meaning is supposed to exist, please show the 
uncancellable meaning of "plod" across the examples we've been considering.

> 
>  > By the way, adding "slow" to plod is not redundant for me in example (2)
>  > I gave, it just specifies that the "plodding" action is "slow" rather
>  > than "fast". it is unnecessary to specify it in (3).
>  >
>  > Regards,
>  > David Kummerow.
>  >
>  >
> I said it before, but now will say it again because apparently you
> didn’t understand: uncancellable meaning often does not cross
> dialectal or language boundaries. In fact, that is one of the
> definitions of dialectal use, namely that it varies from standard use,
> that the rules that apply to the standard do not apply to the
> dialectal use. This is also why I say we need to be very cautious when
> applying linguistic concepts learned from cognate languages when
> studying Biblical Hebrew, because what is uncancellable meaning in
> Biblical Hebrew, may actually have the opposite understanding in a
> cognate language.

Again, I repeat: From you point of view. Yet the question still remains: 
for those who see semantic meaning as uncancellable meaning, which is 
the semantics of "plod" in such a non-standard dialect (to use your 
terms)? If uncancellable meaning is supposed to exist, please show the 
uncancellable meaning of "plod" across the examples we've been considering.

> 
> Because you apparently don’t understand what Rolf wrote about, your
> criticism of Rolf’s work is flawed.

I'm not sure what you mean. "Plod" is just the case in point. In my 
review I raised countless examples from language exhibiting 
multifunctionality where uncancellable meaning cannot be discerned 
across the range of uses. Might I say, much of this data is found in 
standard grammars of various languages. That is, it cannot be put down 
to dialectical use as you want to claim with "plod". None of this is 
treated by Rolf. And it's a problem for his work, because he relies on 
the assumption that semantics is uncancellable meaning and he is all 
about finding the semantics of the BH verbal system.

I think it's better to define a prototypical meaning and allow for 
non-prototypical uses. I wrote in my review:

"Chapter two (“Methodology, definitions, and text”) moves to 
methodological issues. Furuli critiques the modern tendency, at least in 
biblical studies, towards discourse analysis, suggesting that an 
approach similar to that of the natural sciences in which the smallest 
independent language units are studied is preferable. He argues that 
“[t]here is no reason to believe that what is stored in the mind are 
clauses or sentences or higher units, but rather single concepts, each 
one being signalled by one word” (p. 28). Furuli here seems oblivious to 
work, particularly in construction grammar, which demonstrates that 
constructions themselves are also mentally stored alongside lexical 
stock traditionally associated with the mental lexicon.  Blindly, then, 
Furuli proceeds to outline the nature of lexical mental 
conceptualization without any reference to grammatical constructions. He 
states that “[i]t seems psycholinguists are correct when they say that 
the central part, or the nucleus, of [the mental concept triggered by a 
lexical word] tends to be relatively clear, but the concept becomes more 
dim or fuzzy the further away from the nucleus we proceed” (p. 28). As 
will be demonstrated further below, Furuli’s (partially-true) 
psycholinguistic insight here is actually in conflict with his advanced 
methodology. Moreover, it is even to some extent erroneous: moving away 
from the prototypical meaning of a word to non-prototypical meaning 
(Furuli’s “dim” and “fuzzy” above) does not have to entail that the 
prototypical meaning (Furuli’s “nucleus”) is retained in such 
non-prototypical uses.  In other words, meaning is not static, and it is 
not simply non-referentiality which produces linguistic fuzziness (pp. 
28–29) but also the related issues of grammaticalization; 
constructional narrowing, widening, or even neutralization of 
prototypical meaning;  and some semantic regions which seem 
typologically prone to multifunctionality (a large number of examples is 
provided towards the end of the review). It is thus important to note 
that when Furuli relates his lexical discussion to what he calls 
“morphosyntactic words” -- instances of which are verbal conjugations -- 
by saying that they are “non-referential” and as such “their concepts … 
[are] much more fuzzy” (p. 28), what he means by this is not that 
prototypical meaning can be altered -- as is actually admitted in 
prototype theory in psycholinguistics!"

"From this basis, the chapter moves to a discussion of methodology 
proper. Here Furuli states (pp. 31–32):

	In the study of the verbal system of a dead language, informants are 
lacking, so the question is: By what means can we hope to find the 
meaning of the smallest units of this verbal system as the Hebrews 
understood it? When we choose a methodology, it is extremely important 
to differentiate between the parts that have an intrinsic meaning that 
never change, and those parts whose meaning is dependent upon the 
context and are changeable. So we should differentiate between semantics 
and pragmatics.

"Just why such a differentiation is “extremely important” remains 
unstated. More significantly, it is simply assumed that “intrinsic 
meaning that never change[s]” is a linguistic reality, and remains 
throughout the work as an unsubstantiated assumption. However, the 
corollary of admitting to lexical fuzziness within linguistics is 
generally that there is not necessarily an attribute or set of 
attributes which is applicable across the uses of any given lexical item 
(or syntactic construction, etc.) such that non-prototypical uses may 
only optionally carry an attribute or set of attributes essential to 
more central use(s).  In other words, “they may show what is often 
called family resemblances or a radial structure, i.e., each meaning is 
linked by resemblance to some other meaning, but the network of meanings 
may be so large that meanings at different ends of it show no traces of 
similarities.”"

I have just pasted the main text. There's copious footnotes which 
provide references to the linguistic literature where my points are 
demonstrated and defended.


> 
> Note, I have not defended Rolf, he may be wrong too, but your
> arguments and criticism that you have presented so far has been based
> on dialectal experience and solipsism, hardly the grounds for
> dispassionate, scholarly study.

Karl, all I've been doing here is interacting with the example Rolf gave 
and asked for me to disprove. Since it is an English example, I can 
really only approach it from my own familiarity and knowledge of the 
language. Again, I repeat: From you point of view. Yet the question 
still remains: for those who see semantic meaning as uncancellable 
meaning, which is the semantics of "plod" in such a non-standard dialect 
(to use your terms)? If uncancellable meaning is supposed to exist, 
please show the uncancellable meaning of "plod" across the examples 
we've been considering.

But like I said before, these pages and pages of documentation I gave in 
my review where such uncancellable meaning cannot be discerned that 
cannot be put down to "dialectal experience and solipsism". That's not a 
fair claim, esp. as you seem to have not read the review as so are not 
in a position to say that my presentation there is only one of 
"dialectal experience and solipsism".

> 
> Karl W. Randolph.
> 

Regards,
David Kummerow.


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