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  • From: Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>
  • To: hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [b-hebrew] Contextual Semantic Domains
  • Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 07:53:50 -0500

>===== Original Message From CS Bartholomew <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net>
=====
>Rope has a prototypical set of semantic features which require minimal
>context to activate. It is an artifact, long, flexible, made of some fibrous
>substance, etc. As an artifact rope has a place in the lexical semantic
>taxonomy of English where it occupies a position different from but related
>to string or twine or thread or cable.

OK, but even this is somewhat vague. Suppose I have a line of braided hemp an
inch thick--rope, right? What if it's a half-inch? Still a pretty good rope.
What if it's a quarter-inch? When does it become twine? (Maybe there is a
technical definition that has to do with the way the material is put
together,
but in ordinary usage I suspect that it's mostly an issue of size. But where
it stops being rope and starts being twine or string may be a fuzzy area.) If
I'm a foreigner trying to learn English, and I see the thick, serpentine
thing
used to tie up the ship on which I came over, and hear someone call it
"rope,"
I begin to get an idea of what "rope" means. I won't necessarily think the
same term applies to the thinner, more colorful, differently shaped rope a
climber uses. But once I hear someone yell "rope" and see it come falling
over
the side (and hopefully not land on me because I didn't know what the yell
meant in context), I might put two and two together and figure out that this
too is rope. So now I know that rope comes in different sizes, shapes, and
colors. Well, that accounts for a lot of what I originally thought defined
rope, but at least I'm left with some common features. And you move on from
there. Sometimes it can get pretty tricky, though, to figure out how terms
are
distinguished in a foreign language, and it might take me quite a while to
nail down what distinguishes rope from twine, string, etc. I do this, though,
primarily through hearing the term in various contexts and re-adjusting my
perceptions of what the word means.
>
>Now the same word, rope, also has a place in the contextual semantic
>taxonomy of English. When a climber on Mt. Rainier is about to cross a snow
>bridge over a crevasse he may ask to be given some rope or he may say "up
>rope" or some similar expression. When a supervisor is dressing down a
>subordinate in the work place, you might here the expression "give him some
>rope" or "cut him some slack." Here we have two similar but different
>instantiations in the English contextual semantic taxonomy for the entry
>"rope."

Personally, I've never heard the term "give him some rope" used in this way.
If I heard it in such a context, I might suspect that it meant roughly the
opposite of "cut him some slack," i.e., give him more rope to hang himself
with. But yes, we do have figures of speech whereby language is taken from
one
arena into another. When you give a climber slack, you give him more freedom
to move. If he falls, he's going to swing around quite a bit more and
possibly
hurt himself, but he also has more flexibility to find the best route. When
you give an employee slack, you relax your hold on him and give him more
freedom to make mistakes. The image fits, and so we make reasonable sense out
of it. But typically this type of thing goes over the head of a foreigner who
hears it for the first time, so in some sense it almost has to be learned as
a
new lexical item.
>
>In the '60s pop single "Hey Joe" or the novel "In Cold Blood" rope takes on
>yet a different contextual meaning.
>
>It seems to me that there is a clear difference of kind between these sets
>of relationships:
>
>lexical relationships
>rope - twine - cable -thread
>
>contextual relationships
>
> "up rope" - 'give him some rope" - "ain't no hangman gonna put a rope
>around me."

The problem with these examples, though, and maybe it's just that the example
of "rope" isn't the best, is that the different contextual meanings depend in
part on different collocations. As I said, "Cut him some slack" is familiar
to
me, while "give him some rope" is not. The former is a fixed expression that
has appeared in wide enough usage that it has its own meaning. Yes, it can
still be used in a literal sense, but now it becomes a choice between lexical
items (or something close to it). Suppose you were belaying a climber (you're
the one holding the rope in case he falls). He does something stupid and gets
himself into a situation where he's likely to fall. At this point, your first
reaction is to make sure the rope is tight and set, so that if he falls, he
won't fall very far. Next, you start berating him for his stupid move. A
bystander says to you, "Cut him some slack--it's his first time climbing." Do
you (a) let out more rope, resulting in a further fall (which will teach him
some valuable lessons, to be sure), or (b) stop criticizing him and coach him
out of the situation? The context is not the problem (except that there are
only so many situations where both options would be viable and one could
result in serious injury). The problem is that two different uses of this
expression have arisen, and you have to choose between them.

Similarly, "up rope" is a technical term in climbing. (A lot of new climbers
make the mistake of saying "take slack," which at a distance can be
ambiguous--he said "slack"--does he want more or less?) "Rope" by itself is
also a technical term. Not that rope stops meaning what it always means, but
when you hear someone shout it from up above, you should watch out for
falling
rope. These are accepted conventions that make communication under adverse
conditions easier for the speaker and the hearer. They don't really affect
the
meaning of the word "rope," but they do make statements that could not be
made
in this way under other circumstances. If I were standing on the street and
saw a rope falling out of the sky, yelling "rope" to a passerby would be only
marginally effective. He will know what the word means, but he won't
understand the information I'm trying to give him.

OK, enough about English and rock climbing. I still think what I said
before--that we determine what words mean by experiencing them in contexts.
In
the examples we've been discussing here, we do the same thing with larger
expressions, particularly when we're dealing with technical or figurative
language. But when we're dealing with ancient texts, I don't know how far
this
gets us. We look at the contexts where a word appears, and we try to collect
the common features. Someimes it's hard to find a common denominator that
accounts for all the possibilities, and the closest we can come to a core
meaning is to keep before us the several possible meanings that we can
observe. But whatever we boil down is a meaning derived from contexts; and
whenever we see variations on this core in a given context, it is usually
(perhaps always) intertwined with unique contextual features that affect the
whole utterance, not just the word by itself.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics





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