Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>]

Dear David,

Two short comments:

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Kummerow" <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2007 9:40 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Question for Rolf on the JW outlook on the Hebrew

snip


. There is often no such thing as
"uncancellable intrinsic meaning", which you maintain and assume in your
research. Eg, you claimed that negation in Hebrew was uncancellable, but
I brought forth some research to show that may not actually be the case.

RF
This is not correct, I have not said that negation in Hebrew is 
uncancelable; please look at the post again. I just suggested a test, in 
order to show that other areas than verbs can be tested.


snip

You see, your quest is for restricted environments where you can
seemingly diagnose "uncancellable intrinsic meaning". Again, this is
because there is a divorce for you between linguistic convention and
semantic meaning. As such, you disregard all the other times a
particular verb form occurs to focus on these restricted examples.
Psycholinguistic research would suggest that this is in error and that
the other examples also impact upon meaning, and in some areas of
grammar perhaps even more so.

Ten years ago I studied applied linguistics, and a great part of our 
curriculum was the study of Psycholinguistics. In my first book on Bible 
translation I used several arguments from Psycholinguistics in a discussion 
of what "lexical mening" is, including arguments based on the Prototyp 
Theory. I referred to the books "The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to 
Psycholiguistics" (1989) and "Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the 
Mental Lexicon" (1993), both written by J. Aitchison. I agree that the 
Prototyp Theory is fine in connection with the mental lexicon and lexical 
semantics. This theory is based on informants, on experiments with living 
people. These experiments have suggested that concepts signaled by words 
exist in the mind, yes, they have even suggested that word classes exist in 
the mind. But they have not suggested that grammatical categories, such as 
indirect objects or conjugations exist in the mind in the same way as 
lexical concepts do. (For those who have not studied Psycholinguistics: This 
is not to say that grammar cannot be memorized, which is something 
different.) Therefore, I do not see there is reason to apply the Prototyp 
Theory to grammatical categories, particularly not in a dead language.  This 
would be highly speculative


Regards,
David Kummerow.
_______________________________________________

Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo