Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

> 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.

DK - OK, perhaps not. But your suggestion of "tests" still implies the 
basic methodology of assuming "uncancellable intrinsic meaning"! Which 
is really what I was objecting too, negation be the example.


> 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

Have a read of Joan Bybee, Adele Goldberg, William Croft, Martin 
Haspelmath, Michael Tomasello etc. Grammatical categories exist mentally 
as constructional meaning as does lexical categories. Prototype theory 
is applied to grammatical categories these days.


> Regards,
> David Kummerow.
> _______________________________________________
>
> Best regards,
>
> Rolf Furuli
> University of Oslo


Regards,
David Kummerow.