Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Rolf Furuli <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear

Clay Bartholomew,

I am skeptical of using linguistic models such as cognitive grammar, montague 
grammar, generative grammar etc. in studies of of a dead language, since they 
may disturb the material under study. But of course, different assumption 
must be used in any study, and data collected inside different disiplines 
must be used. But that need not disturb the dead language data, provided that 
the assumptions themselves are not biased.

I have for many years work with the theoretical sides of Bible translation, 
regarding which I have written two books. And I have also translted documents 
from different Semitic languages into Norwegian. My definition of 
communication is based on this and on data from Psykholinguistics. I would 
like to mention two important points:

1) The letters or sounds of a word have no meaning, but they signal a concept 
(sometimes two) in the minds of those having the same presupposition pool. 
This concept has a core which may be easy to identify by the native speaker, 
but it becomes more fuzzy the further away from the core one comes. These 
concepts are the lexical meaning of words, and this tells us that lexical 
meaning cannot be found in lexicons, it must be known!  When an author writes 
a message s/he uses words that are meant to give the audience a certain 
message. However, the whole concept signalled by each word is not 
communicated to the audience, but the author only makes a part of each 
concept visible. The tool the author uses to make just a part of each concept 
(signalled by a word) visible is the context. So the context does not 
generate new lexical meaning -- all the lexical meaning is there in the form 
of words (concepts), but the role of the context is to make visible a part of 
each lexical meaning.

2. The same role as the context plays in connection with words and concepts, the aspects play in connection with events. An event may contain much information of different kinds, and all this information is not conveyed to the readers of a text. The role of the aspects simply is to make visible a the part of each event, and let everything else remain in the dark. 

However, we should keep in mind that other part of Hebrew can be used to make parts of 
events and states visible.  In class yesterday we discussed Psalm 23, and we discussed 
how *lexical meaning* alone in one case could make visible the situation that the 
"sheep" lies in the grass, and in the other case this resultative situation 
is caused by lexical meaning plus the Piel stem. A resultative situation can also be 
caused by lexical meaning and the imperfective aspect.



Best regards

Rolf Furuli

University of Oslo


C. Stirling Bartholomew wrote:

> On 9/16/04 9:18 AM, "Dr Dale M Wheeler" <dalemw AT multnomah.edu> wrote:
>
>  
>
> > What you seem to 
> > be describing is his terminology of "internal" vs "external" viewpoint
> >    
>
> That's not how I read it.
>
> Rolf Wrote:
>
>  
>
> > I give the following definition of  *communication*:  "To communicate
> > implies from a meaning potential to make a part visible for the audience
> > and to keep the rest invisible."
> >    
>
> I took this to mean Explicature and Impliciture as defined in the cognitive
> framework. 
>
> Perhaps I am misreading Rolf. It happens :-))
>
>
> greetings,
> Clay Bartholomew 
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
>
>
>
>