Biblical Hebrew Forum

[clayton stirling bartholomew <c.s.bartholomew AT worldnet.att.net>]

> Dave Washburn wrote:
> 
> Agreed! Actually I would apply this principle to all linguistic categories:
> semantics, pragmatics and also syntax. In the more completely developed
> version of my theory I call it "social convention." Basically it says that
> words mean what they mean because a society chooses to use them that way.
> I've been accused of doing a Humpty-Dumpty, but this is why I say "a
> society" rather than "a person." In this regard, words have no inherent
> meaning; the word "dog" means a canine, but it also means one who lags
> behind, one who has questionable ethics, as a verb it means to follow
> closely behind, and in Hebrew it means "fish!" Words are strings of sounds,
> and it is only the convention of a society that determines what those
> strings of sounds signify. That's why English "prevent" used to mean
> "precede" but now doesn't, and why no word has an intrinsic uncancellable
> meaning. In English, "bad" used to have a negative connotation that was
> though to be uncancellable; then a segment of American society started using
> it with positive overtones, and now it can either mean "bad" or "good"
> depending on context. It is, however, much harder for a social convention to
> change the force of a grammatical construction than it is to change the
> meaning of an individual word; e.g. it took the Norman conquest to change
> English word order from VSO to SVO.


Dave, 

Back in 1997 (b-greek) I was branded a  Humpty-Dumpty for suggesting that
any generalized theory of semantics needed to include both lexical and
syntactical features of the language and that the principles that governed
lexical semantics were equally applicable to formal language features used
to mark syntactical relationships,  like verb inflection and word order and
so on. 

This suggestion drew fire from certain folks who claimed to be doing
functional linguistics. It was suggested that viewing aspect marking of the
verb as semantically and functionally indeterminate was a slippery slope
toward grammatical chaos.

I would agree with Dave (quoted above) that the semantic function of some
syntactical features of a natural language may be more stable than the
semantic value of some lexical item. However,  I am not sure that language
change is really the most important aspect of this question.  If we take a
snapshot of a language state I think we will discover that there is some
polysemy present at any given time in the grammatical system of the
language. 

What boggles my mind is the lack of willingness on the part of folks who
take polysemy for granted in lexical semantics to recognized and accept
polysemy in the relationships between formal features of the grammar and the
syntactical functions marked by those formal features.  People who would
never dream of doing a concordant translation in terms of lexical semantics
will turn right around and defend to the death a concordant translation in
terms of verb aspect marking or some other feature of syntax.

Once you accept a model for doing semantics, the relationship between formal
grammatical features  and syntactical functions should IMHO be treated in
the same manner as the relationships between a lexeme and meaning. This
would include the acceptance of polysemy, the mapping of formal features to
functions in a complex domain network, all of the methods which are common
place in lexical semantics.

Clay
 
--  
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062