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  • From: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Question for Rolf on the JW outlook on the Hebrew
  • Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2007 22:12:30 +1100



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.





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