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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Relevance Theory & Hebrew Semantics

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: "C. Stirling Bartholomew" <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net>
  • Cc: hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Relevance Theory & Hebrew Semantics
  • Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 18:16:03 +0100

On 16/08/2004 17:19, C. Stirling Bartholomew wrote:

About two weeks ago there was an exchange of views* between a Greek classics
professor and a senior translation consultant, both very knowledgeable
people, which came down to a war of methodologies between traditional
philology (19th century) and cognitive linguistics (late 20th century).

In response to this question I obtained several books on Relevance Theory
and Pragmatics and was reading them when this question of the golden calf
(Ex. 32) came up. I tried to approach the question with the Grice's
co-operative principle in mind as well maximizing the significance of the
contextual semantic domain of the verb CWR (Ex. 32:4).

While working on this some questions about the applicability of Relevance
Theory (RT) to ancient texts crossed my mind. First, RT appears to be about
spoken language not texts. Second, RT works from a set of axioms, e.g.,
Grice's co-operative principle, which seem to me rather utopian when applied
to ancient texts.
What do I mean by utopian? RT seems to presume that discourse segments are
semantically highly cohesive. Without out this assumption the whole approach
seems to fall apart. Furthermore, reconstructing the contextual semantic
domain of the verb CWR (Ex. 32:4) is a serious project.

My question: What use can be made of Relevance Theory with ancient texts
where the context (external) is difficult to reconstruct with any certainty?


Clay, I wonder if there are many people on this list who are familiar with Relevance Theory, but I am one who is, mostly in connection with its applicability to translation. In fact you might like to see the draft paper Holy Communicative? available from my website, which discusses among other things RT and translation. In some circles I am seen as an opponent of RT. But I accept RT as a description of how language works. My objections are to how some have extended RT descriptions of different types of translation into a prescription that only one of the types is valid for the Bible.

RT is not just about spoken language. Maybe this was the original application, but its principles have been extended and applied to written texts. Principles like Grice's certainly apply in principle, because the texts were written for certain audiences and there was an assumption that these audiences would understand them; but maybe it is utopian to expect to be able to reconstruct those shared assumptions in the case of a BH text (although not in the case of every ancient text - I am currently working on 1 Corinthians, which is part of an ongoing exchange of views which can be partially reconstructed with profound implications on interpretation).

I just looked at the relevant b-greek archives. I'm not sure you described the disagreement fairly. The Greek professor was appealing not so much to 19th century rules as to actual usage in Koine texts. This usage is part of the context, and so any RT insights about the meaning must be dependent on this usage. Unfortunately with Hebrew we don't have the same wealth of contemporary texts to enlighten us about actual usage.

To come back to b-hebrew, part of the problem with the Golden Calf story is a lack of agreement about the correct context of this story. David Rohl would find its context among people who have just left 13th dynasty Egypt. Others would put it later in Egyptian history, up to the 19th dynasty. George Somsel suggests a context in the divided kingdom era. No doubt there are others who would make the context post-exilic or even Hellenistic. Maybe more than one of these is true e.g. an original story from the Middle Bronze Age has been retold by Iron Age redactors. How do we proceed? We cannot safely argue, as we can when looking at the New Testament, from the context to the interpretation. Rather we are forced to find an interpretation and then see what context we can fit it into. Or we can hypothesise a context and see if we can come up with a plausible interpretation in that context. The problem is that our knowledge of the language and of the contexts in different eras is rarely sufficient for us to be able to rule anything out. So I guess the best we can say might be something like "If the Golden Calf story is set in such-and-such a period, the calf was probably made in such-and-such a way".

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/






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