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  • From: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Uncancelable meaning
  • Date: Sat, 07 Apr 2007 15:32:14 +1000


Hi Rolf,

I've given what Nordlander said below a bit more thought.

Aside from what Stoney, Peter, and I previously said -- which is eschewed by Nordlander in his reply -- and also what we have now said in response to his reply, I would like to add the following evidence which points against his analysis.

Suppose a context in which I am having an evening meal at an up-market restaurant (which is highly unlikely for me, mind you!), i.e. I am having an experience of dining. Suppose now a new waiter rudely interrupts my meal, to which I could respond:

a) Excuse me! I am having my meal!

b) Excuse me! I am having my dinner!

c) Excuse me! I am dining!


c) actually sounds unnatural to me. a) and b) are fine, but cannot be interpreted statively as under Nordlander's uncancellable meaning proposal. "I am having my dinner!" equates to "I am eating" or "I am currently eating" or more periphrastically "I am in the process of eating" or "I am currently in the process of eating". In other words, "have" here refers to the dynamic process of eating, exactly what Nordlander say's "dine" means. Ditto for a). However, "dine" sounds unnatural, perhaps because it is nowadays falling out of everyday use. Even though I am, in fact, "dining", i.e. I am in the dynamic process of eating some trendy meal, it still sounds unnatural and old-fashion to say it, while "I am having dinner" sounds much more natural.

A problem I see with this for you is that you are caught between a rock and a hard place. If you take the option of saying that supposedly uncancellable meaning has been cancelled in this instance, you open up the methodology which you have applied to BH to challenge since it is now admitted that cancellable meaning does not always have to exist. However, if you take the second option and continue to side with Nordlander's analysis, you risk getting all the native English speakers offside with your analysis because we understand Nordlander as seeing things which don't exist for native speakers and so then this could be potentially the case with your analysis of BH, i.e. you have identified meaning which native BH speakers would see as absurd. So there's no good option for you, but them's the issues with this whole "uncancellable meaning" thing.

Regards,
David Kummerow.



Subject:
Re: [b-hebrew] Uncancelable meaning
From:
"Rolf Furuli" <furuli AT online.no>
Date:
Thu, 5 Apr 2007 15:43:17 +0100
To:
<b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>

To:
<b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>


Dear David,

I copied your post below and the post of Stoney Breyer, and asked Dr. Johan Nordlander for his comments. I have copied his reply below.

Hi Rolf,
well, as far as I can make out reading the things you quote below, you're right; these commentators do not distinguish between semantics and pragmatics. However, WHY they do so is perfectly understandable and also natural for non-linguists. For anyone dealing with the messages of utterances then pragmatics quite natural is the thing.


Now, what these critics do not understand is the fact that the meaning value of any word or morpheme taken in isolation IS a question of semantics. Only when you add additional language elements and/or extralinguistic factors do things open up for interpretation, that is, pragmatics. This means that what the commentators below discuss is not the meaning/semantics of the verb itself, but the meaning (message) of the entire utterances.


For example, the phrase "have dinner" is NOT exactly the same thing as "dine". The reason is that the collocation of the verb (have) and the noun (dinner), yielding "have dinner" focuses on the (dinner having) situation as a whole, in its entirety, that is, as a state of affairs. "Dine", being a processive verb, focuses on the process and the different consecutive phases of that process itself. The result is, of course, that "have dinner" is somewhat similar in pragmatic meaning to "dine". BUT NOT identical. For the layman or non-linguist this might, again quite understandly, be nittpicking or mere quibbling, but for the professional linguist these subtle differences ARE of great analytic interest.

Johan Nordlander





Best regards,

Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Kummerow" <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 8:41 PM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Uncancelable meaning


Hi Rolf,

I notice below that it seems the English expression is wider than
Australian English. I'll add a bit more so that the English is plain for
you and so your linguistic theory might stop blinding you to the reality
of the English expression.

Suppose an English teacher was up the front of class and she was getting
the students to think about the word "have". Supposed she asked "what do
you have?" The default construal of this would be that the question is
one of possession, either as in a) below as a question of owned
possessions or physical attributes as in b):

a) I have a cat (= I own/possess a cat)

b) I have a big nose (= I possess a big nose)

Both are stative situations.

The answer in a) can refer to possessions currently with them at their
desk or not (as in a) above where the cat is most likely at home, but
could be at school on a show-and-tell day):

c) I have a blue pen

Since our present discussion revolves around eating, here's another
possible answer to the question:

d) I have a plate of dinner

This can only be construed that a plate with the student's dinner is on
their desk or at least in their immediate vicinity at the moment of
speaking. Again, the construal is stative.

However, suppose the teacher were to ask "What do you have at Maxim's?"
This could be answered in a few ways, for example:

e) I have a large plate of chips

Notice how the construal by the student is as a question asking about
what the student usually orders at Maxim's, ie it is a question as to
what they usually eat. Although e) has the same syntactic structure as
a) to d) above, semantically it differs as it now is construed as an
action and not a state, ie it is not a "state of eating a large plate of
chips" but that "a large plate of chips is usually eaten or consumed".
"Have" here could be replaced with "eat" without any difference in
meaning as in f), which would be an entirely acceptable alternative
answer to the teacher's question:

f) I eat a large plate of chips

Further, another possible answer is as in g) and h):

g) We have breakfast at Maxim's (quite frequently)

h) We have dinner at Maxim's (quite frequently)

Here, the student has construed the question to be not so much about
individual menu items, but about mealtimes. "Quite frequently" is
optional and simply adds what is implicit in the reply. Both answers
above could also we given as:

i) We eat breakfast at Maxim's (quite frequently)

j) We eat dinner at Maxim's (quite frequently)

The "eating" here is not stative as you suggest, but as a gnomic and
perfective act of eating: this is what the student and family commonly do.

So as you can hopefully see, "have" can be both stative and active
meanings. If is construed as about possession it is stative; if it is
construed as about eating it is active. These are but two examples of
"have", but they do demonstrate the variability of English where the
same syntactic structure may have two (or more) possible readings.

Is this convincing?

Regards,
David Kummerow.



Dear David:

In this case I have to agree with you.

On 3/30/07, David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Rolf,
>
> Let me say again: "have" in the example you cite is commonly used
> throughout Australia to mean "to eat" and not "to be in a state of
> eating". My intuition here is that it might even NEVER occur with the
> meaning you assign. The "linguistic analysis" here you present is just
> plain wrong as you force a meaning to my words which I just do not mean.
> A true linguistic representation of the sentence you cite with the
> assigned meaning should actually be given a # in the front or something
> to show that this meaning is absurd to native speakers.
>
> "Had" can also be used in the same manner: "We had dinner at Maxim's".
> This equates to "We ate dinner at Maxim's".
>
> To repeat: Despite your linguistic intuitions here, they are in conflict
> with how the phrase would be understood by English speakers in
> Australia, perhaps elsewhere too I would say.
>
What you state is accurate for American English as well.

> In this case you really should withdraw your statements and admit you
> were wrong.
>
> Regards,
> David Kummerow.
>
>
In this case, I'm thankful that English is my mother tongue. Even a
millennium after the Norman invasion, English is still somewhat of a
creole, with oddities and exceptions galore. Though it is a relatively
simple language to learn its basics, it is one of the most difficult
languages to master.

Rolf: you are wrong here. You have run into one of those oddities and
exceptions of English. Your command of the English language is quite
good, better than many, but native speakers recognize that you have
erred on this issue in English.

Too bad there are no surviving speakers of Biblical Hebrew to show
where "we got it wrong".

Yours, Karl W. Randolph.


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