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  • From: "Eduard C Hanganu" <eddhanganu AT hotmail.com>
  • To: peterkirk AT qaya.org
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Relevance Theory & Hebrew Semantics
  • Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 21:40:38 -0500


Dear Peter:

You state:

"But I would have severe problems with any hypothesis that the Hebrew Bible contains (except perhaps very rarely e.g. Isaiah 28:10,13) deliberately nonsensical passages."

Indeed, the fact that sometimes we do not see cohesion in a discourse fragment doesn't mean that the fragment lacks it. A simple possibility is that we lack the necessary background for the decoding of the meaning of the passage, or that we did not include a sufficiently large context in our search to rezolve the "puzzle." To even hypothesize that the Bible would contain "nonsensical passages" would also mean to deny its Divine origin, to affirm that God did not intend to communicate with us when he prompted the Biblical writers to express His mind in written form.

You mention Isaiah 28:10,13 as an example of a "deliberately nonsensical passage." How did you reach such a conclusion? In most English translations this passage makes rather good sense, the way I understand it. What is your reading of this text?

I mentioned before the common confusion between the "sense" of a word ( a lexical concept, or its definition which is context independent) and the word's "meaning" ( which is context dependent to such a degree that sometimes no dictionary "sense" can be applied to the specific word in the specific context. When we talk about "hapax" words the matter becomes evident, because the only way we can understand the meaning of the such words for which we do not have any established use is to allow the context to define their use. Such circumstances could explain why some discourse fragments do not "make sense" to us: we may be bound by certain "established senses" of some words to such a degree that the application of those "senses" to the passage produces a nonsensical "jumble" and not a message. We need then to return to the discourse fragment bias free and allow the text to define the meaning of the words in that specific context until the meaning of the passage becomes clear.


Eduard





From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
To: "C. Stirling Bartholomew" <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net>
CC: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Relevance Theory & Hebrew Semantics
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 14:08:30 +0100

On 18/08/2004 02:51, C. Stirling Bartholomew wrote:

...

When I talk about a break down in semantic cohesion I am referring to a
situation where the **lexical** semantic values assigned to the low level
constituents in a discourse segment do not work together coherently. The
text analyst is tempted in a situation like this to look at alternatives to
these assignments in order to resolve the problem and in some cases we end
up with a forced fit; a reading where dubious semantic values are used with
less than adequate justification because the analyst is compelled to find a
semanticly cohesive text.

I see this happening all the time.



And surely this is a perfectly correct method. If we assume that a discourse unit is intended to make sense (i.e. it is not a random collection of words, or the result of textual corruption, or a deliberately constructed example of your "Highly cohesive discourse segments which didn't make any sense at all"), we must assume that words which have ranges of meaning, multiple senses etc are used with senses that fit the context in the discourse, even if these are in fact very rare senses of those words. I accept that some interpreters do give forced interpretations, perhaps because in fact there is textual corruption etc, or because they are unaware of (or for other reasons unwilling to accept) alternative interpretations which do make sense in the context. And in a language like Hebrew many common words may have rare senses of which we now have no clear surviving evidence, and as a result we are left guessing in some passages. But, let me repeat, just because we cannot now reconstruct the semantic cohesion of some passages, that doesn't mean there wasn't any.

Discourse cohesion is something that can be attained somewhat independent of
semantic content. You can have a cohesive discourse segment as defined by
Halliday and Hasan which has no coherent meaning. ...


Yes, such nonsense texts can be constructed. But I would have severe problems with any hypothesis that the Hebrew Bible contains (except perhaps very rarely e.g. Isaiah 28:10,13) deliberately nonsensical passages.

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


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