Biblical Hebrew Forum

[David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>]

Yitzhak's examples are exactly of the type I was meaning. Let's look at 
"plod" a little more closely.

Rolf claimed "that 'slow' is a part of the semantic meaning of "plod" 
(there are no situations when 'slow' can be cancelled or separated from 
'plod')." So the example:

(1) Elsie plodded along.

What is meant by (1) is not "slow", but "slow walking", ie dawdling. 
Such a conceptualisation can be extended to acts of non-walking in the 
form of [slowly perform action associated with x], where 'x' is 
generally represented by an adjunct phrase.

(2) Elsie plodded through the exam.

Perhaps because "plod" is associated with a walking action, it can also 
loose the meaning of "slow" and designate instead something similar to 
"tramping", at least for some dialects of English. So to use Yitzhak's 
example:

(3) Even though the horse was not afraid of the dead animal, he was 
still pleased to be leaving and needed no urging to plod quickly downhill.

In (3) we see that "plod" can cooccur with "quickly". Now, Rolf said 
that that to use an adverb like "slowing" in conjunction with "plod" 
would be redundant, since "plod" already has this meaning as part of its 
uncancellable meaning. However, if we substitute "quickly" for "slowly" 
in the above example, we see that we have two very different 
conceptualisations:

(4) Even though the horse was not afraid of the dead animal, he was 
still pleased to be leaving and needed no urging to plod slowly downhill.

As such, we see that the notion of "slow" in relation to "plod" can in 
fact undergo cancellation. The question for Rolf would be: what is the 
uncancellable meaning of "plod" for dialects of English which accept 
(3)? (For me, even (1) and (2) are not the same either as I indicated 
above.) If "plod" is to have some sort of semantics under a methodology 
which adheres to the principal that semantics represents meaning which 
cannot be cancelled, then what is the meaning of "plod"? Or do we just 
say that "plod" has no semantics in such a dialect and that any meaning 
it has is simply pragmatic meaning which can be cancelled?

Regards,
David Kummerow.



> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 8:03 PM, Stoney Breyer wrote:
>  > I concur with Karl respecting "plod"; indeed, I would go further and 
> say that "slow" is in
>  > fact uncancellable in "plod" and that "plod quickly" is an oxymoron 
> in *any* English
>  > dialect.
>
>  >From a google search on "plod quickly":
> http://www.amazon.com/Toscco-Happy-Family/dp/B000007TIP
> "The compositions can plod quickly along over massive speed bumps; they 
> can also
> slow down to take in the scenery."
>
> http://disapprovingblue.net/finished/the_order/order15.html
> "He heard the little boy's footsteps plod quickly up to it."
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=s6U_mYyH1iMC&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=plod
> "Even though the horse was not afraid of the dead animal, he was still
> pleased to be
> leaving and needed no urging to plod quickly downhill."
>
> If we go ahead and claim that "Just that within a particular language
> at a particular
> time words may have meanings that are uncancellable" where a
> "particular language"
> may indicate a specific sociolect -- "in the variety of English that I
> grew up learning,
> namely that of the upper Midwest of the United States."  What in this
> case is the
> particular language and time of the entire Bible?
>
> Yitzhak Sapir