Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT SIL.ORG]

Thank you, Dave, for your interesting comments and your time taken on 
this. I was of course not trying to say that there is no place for 
understanding the word and clause level. But I hope no-one's 
understanding of art stops at the brush-stroke level. Let me answer 
some specific points below.


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[3]: WP
Author:  dwashbur AT nyx.net at internet
Date:    26/01/1999 17:28


DW: Again,
the real question is "what am I trying to accomplish when I listen 
to/examine this work?"

PK: Well, if you want to study techniques of harmony etc maybe you 
don't need to look at the higher level. But if you want to understand 
the overall message of the composer, you need to examine the work as a 
whole and not just its parts. The latter is the better analogy to the 
interest I have in the Hebrew Bible.

PK: > Do you really understand real utterances in your own language, 
say > what your family members say to you, on a word-by-word basis?

DW: Sometimes not even then ;-)  The difference, of course, is that 
the language they speak is also my native language and I've already 
coded the intuitions about the rules it uses to generate clauses 
into my brain cells.  We don't have anybody like that with BH,...

PK: Well, I am assuming a basic knowledge of Hebrew grammar and 
vocabulary in parallel with discourse studies; but not the sort of 
argument I have heard in which we are expected to answer every 
question at the clause level before even considering discourse.

...

DW: My goal is to find the rules for BH that generated all and only the 
grammatical sentences in the language.
I don't think that we can analyze the larger discourse units properly 
unless and until we understand the generating and filtering system 
that excluded nongrammatical clauses from the native speaker's
mental grammar.

PK: A great goal. I would rather say "discourses" than "sentences", 
but of course that changes it from a very difficult task into an 
impossible one! To my mind, the problem with this approach is that 
the filtering system is not just within the clause but also comes 
down from the discourse level. Maybe you are thinking of separate 
clause level and discourse level filters. But in fact (thinking of 
English) I suspect that if you try to filter out at the clause level 
only those sentences which could not be valid in any discourse 
context (including a conversation between people who have a very 
high level of shared background knowledge e.g. between husband and 
wife), you would be left with a very weak filter. (Or none at all if 
you allow the context "The following sentence is invalid: ..." ;-) )

DW: Structural grammars are by nature overly complex and rather 
disunified,
whereas generative grammars seek ultimate simplicity and unity of 
usage based on the (internal) rules that do the generating.  Once 
we have those, we can look at how variously-generated clauses are
put together into larger discourse units and used creatively; I don't 
know how a generative approach would do the reverse.

PK: Maybe the generative approach is so inherently over-simplifying 
here that it has to be modified.

...

DW: If I say "it's cloudy today" nobody needs a larger discourse 
unit to understand what I mean.

PK: Rather, if you say this as a complete discourse (i.e. with a 
zero discourse context e.g. you say this and nothing else to 
someone next to you on a bus) people probably know what you mean. 
But if you say this as part of a longer discourse on a different 
subject e.g. about the water in an aquarium, the meaning may be 
quite different. So you cannot determine the meaning apart from 
the discourse.

DW: I tell my daughter, "Read!"  And she doesn't need a clause to 
figure out what I mean.  She grabs her book.

PK: This is simply a one clause, one word discourse. The word 
"read" does not always mean in other contexts exactly what it means 
in this context e.g. it may be present tense or infinitive rather 
than an imperative.

DW: It seems to me that the patterns you describe are based on the 
exceptions rather than on the rule.

PK: But a rule which has many exceptions and cannot account for 
them is a questionable rule. I would like to find a new set of 
rules which have fewer exceptions.


Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.

Peter Kirk