Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Peter wrote:-

>A better example I was looking at today from the same set of source
>books: "whoever is least among you all is the greatest" (Luke 9:48). If
>"least" and "greatest" have any semantic meanings, they are entirely
>opposite and incompatible, but this did not stop someone from saying
>that both of these describe the same people.

This is a type of one-off usage. Its sufficiently strange that it
gets your attention. Its effectiveness relies on it being strange.
One could be pedantic and say its meaningless, but most people
have no trouble understanding it. The dictionary meaning of ``least''
has been canceled in this example. But if you send the example
to the keepers of the dictionaries and ask them to include a new
meaning such that ``least'' can mean ``greatest'', they aren't going
to be receptive. Why?

>Well, possibly. But the fact that even contrived sentences can cancel
>the alleged rules proves that the rules are not truly uncancellable. As
>for "special usage", that is a nice maxim which allows "uncancellable"
>to lose all its meaning, because there is no definition of "special
>usage" or way of recognising it except that the "uncancellable" rule has
>been cancelled. The problem is that real language, especially in more
>colloquial varieties, is full of what might be called "special usages"
>which have various kinds of grammatical or semantic irregularities. So
>we end up with a set of rules which are uncancellable only in an
>artificially and arbitrarily restricted subset of a real language, but
>are not really uncancellable in the language as it is spoken.

Why don't you call this ``conversational pragmatic implicature''? :-)
Sorry, I shouldn't do that. I don't think English is a very good
language to draw examples from because it is spoken by a wide
variety of people in large number of dialects and its all called
English. But lets run with it anyway. The example of ``least''
and ``greatest'' was probably spoken originally in Aramaic,
translated into Greek and then to English. In all three languages
the message is understandable, but in no case does ``least''
really assume the meaning of ``greatest'' even in this limited
one-off type situation. No Aramaic, Greek, or English dictionary
is going to put this in. One could have said ``A humble person is
a great person''. But that's so pedestrian the message would
probably get lost.

To take another example, in the movie ``Glory Road'', which is set
in the mid-1960s, one of the negro characters takes one of the
white characters aside and explains that ``bad'' in their lingo
means ``good''. But if you wrote a dictionary for this dialect
and did decide to include ``good'' as a definition of ``bad'' you'd
probably add some sort of qualifier to indicate it only had this
usage in some restricted case or cases. It interesting that the
character, in the context of the film, knows enough about ``proper''
English to act as an interpreter.

Also, I think you're misrepresenting Rolf on this point. He's talked
about conversational pragmatic implicature over many years and
I think this is what he's on about. I could be wrong on that
point, of course. I personally think that ``uncancellable''
is a poor choice of word to describe what is, I think, what most
people would understand by the dictionary meaning of a word, but
in one sense it is right. One-offs and limited colloquialisms don't
change the dictionary. So, in one sense, the meaning is not cancelled.
It takes a major shift like what has happened to the word ``nice''
to cancel the past accepted usage.

Bill Rea, ICT Services, University of Canterbury \_
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