Biblical Hebrew Forum

["C. Stirling Bartholomew" <jacksonpollock AT earthlink.net>]

On 8/27/04 7:17 PM, "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com> wrote:

> You may be saying that such categories do not, strictly speaking,
> have objective reality ...

Yes, something like that.

> ... but 
> it is still the case that there are repeated ways in which the
> genitive, accusative, and nominative are used in Hebrew that it is
> good for one to know.

There must be a better way of teaching it. Students who end up asking the
question: Is this a "genitive of authorship" or a "genitive of source"  have
fallen into a trap set for them by their instructors and their text books.
These are the same students who think that by identifying the mythical
semantic category of the genitive they have now obtained a key to exegesis
of the clause. 

Dave Washburn is right. You don't have to study cognitive linguistics to see
what is wrong with this thinking. In fact I don't pretend to have any idea
how someone from the cognitive school would go about writing a grammar. It
might end up looking just like Waltke/O'Conner's chapter on the genitive.
I am reading of cognitive linguistics in light of 20+ years of reading in
language theory and trying to sort it out. An exercise in D.Blakemore:1992*
got me started on this.

Keep in mind I am just thinking out loud.
That is what these lists are for, right?


greetings,
Clay Bartholomew 
 
* Blakemore, Diane. 1992. Understanding Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell.
Page 83, Exercise #2,