Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peterson, Trevor M 06PETERSON" <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

Although RT seems to presuppose a spoken-language situation, I think the same 
thing is generally true of anything in or around modern linguistic 
methodology. The question then becomes, how well can we apply such ideas to 
written texts or other media? I'm not sure that the medium is so much the 
issue here as the communicative setting. Take the b-hebrew forum as an 
example. I suspect that RT works reasonably well as applied to our 
discussions. Granted, there are elements of communication that are difficult 
to convey in writing, but the give-and-take of regular communication is still 
there. We can think of it on a continuum with face-to-face communication, 
telephone conversation, and conversation by relay, teletype, instant 
messaging, etc. On the other hand, the scenario is somewhat different when we 
come to a formal, recorded presentation, whether that presentation is 
recorded in writing, on an audio CD, a DVD, etc. What fundamentally changes 
is the give-and-take. It may be that if someone publishes an article in a 
peer-reviewed journal someone else will publish a response six months or a 
year later, and they can go back and forth like that, but generally speaking, 
when you write an article or book or what have you, you aren't expecting a 
dialog. So you present yourself differently, and the reader also acts 
differently, and that's where I think we might find some of these 
dialog-based theories running aground. As a reader of an ancient text, where 
there is no chance whatsoever that I will be able to communicate with the 
human author, I'm left to muddle along the best I can. I might read with the 
assumption that the author was following certain conventions of 
communication, and a theory like RT might help me process the implications, 
but I think you're right that there could be problems.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics


-----Original Message-----
From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of C. Stirling Bartholomew
Sent: Mon 8/16/2004 12:19 PM
To: hebrew
Subject: [b-hebrew] Relevance Theory & Hebrew Semantics
 
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?

greetings,
Clay Bartholomew 
 

*b-greek archives July & August, A.Nyland/I.Larsen exchange. 

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