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  • From: David Kummerow <farmerjoeblo AT hotmail.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] b-hebrew Uncancellable meaning and Hebrew verbs
  • Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:02:59 +1000




Using your standard above, except applying it to me and the way I have
heard and read the term, your examples are nonsense. Oxymoron. They do
not communicate. To the people around me, you are Humpty Dumpty, willy
nilly changing the meanings of words for your own purposes with no eye
towards communicating to the world.

Karl, to me these examples do in fact communicate and it is clear what is meant in each use. It is not Humpty Dumpty English, but acceptable English in my part of the world.


The question then becomes, who is correct? Which use is the standard
use that people can refer to for effective communication? When
checking reference works from international sources, if they agreed
with you, then I would have to reconsider my understanding of the term
in order to communicate with the world at large. But they don’t.
Without exception, all the reference works I consulted give a meaning
that is consistent with what I hear, and at variance with yours.
Therefore, I can conclude that your data is non-standard, dialectal,
not only can be, but should be, ignored when dealing with standard
usage (possibly mentioned in a footnote).

Sure it might be non-standard to you circles. That still doesn't mean that we can't ask the question: if semantics is meaning which uncancellable across the uses of a lexeme etc. in a language or dialect, what is the semantics of "plod" in such a dialect?

Really, this is just a case in point for me. I've raised numerous areas of language in my review where multifunctionality is the order of the day and where some so-called uncancellable meaning can not be discerned across the various uses. Of course, none of which Rolf has treated nor admits he's considered as part of my criticism of his approach.


> Like I've
> repeatedly asked: what is the uncancellable meaning/semantics of "plod"
> for such people whose examples I listed are entirely acceptable?

Because we are dealing with non-standard, dialectal use, the question
is irrelevant.

From you point of view. Yet the question still remains: for those who see semantic meaning as uncencellable meaning, which is the semantics of "plod" in such a non-standard dialect (to use your terms)? If uncancellable meaning is supposed to exist, please show the uncancellable meaning of "plod" across the examples we've been considering.


> At some
> point, the "uncancellable meaning" of "plod" that existed in your own
> so-called "international standard English" actually was cancelled -- and
> these days now to the point that the use does not sound "weird", is not
> poetic, is not some extreme use, etc. How can this occur if semantics is
> said to be uncancellable meaning? And what is the uncancellable meaning
> that is now the result? What is the "uncancellable meaning" of "plod"
> across the examples I gave?
>
Your questions are nonsense, based on the above.

I repeat: From you point of view. Yet the question still remains: for those who see semantic meaning as uncencellable meaning, which is the semantics of "plod" in such a non-standard dialect (to use your terms)? If uncancellable meaning is supposed to exist, please show the uncancellable meaning of "plod" across the examples we've been considering.


> By the way, adding "slow" to plod is not redundant for me in example (2)
> I gave, it just specifies that the "plodding" action is "slow" rather
> than "fast". it is unnecessary to specify it in (3).
>
> Regards,
> David Kummerow.
>
>
I said it before, but now will say it again because apparently you
didn’t understand: uncancellable meaning often does not cross
dialectal or language boundaries. In fact, that is one of the
definitions of dialectal use, namely that it varies from standard use,
that the rules that apply to the standard do not apply to the
dialectal use. This is also why I say we need to be very cautious when
applying linguistic concepts learned from cognate languages when
studying Biblical Hebrew, because what is uncancellable meaning in
Biblical Hebrew, may actually have the opposite understanding in a
cognate language.

Again, I repeat: From you point of view. Yet the question still remains: for those who see semantic meaning as uncancellable meaning, which is the semantics of "plod" in such a non-standard dialect (to use your terms)? If uncancellable meaning is supposed to exist, please show the uncancellable meaning of "plod" across the examples we've been considering.


Because you apparently don’t understand what Rolf wrote about, your
criticism of Rolf’s work is flawed.

I'm not sure what you mean. "Plod" is just the case in point. In my review I raised countless examples from language exhibiting multifunctionality where uncancellable meaning cannot be discerned across the range of uses. Might I say, much of this data is found in standard grammars of various languages. That is, it cannot be put down to dialectical use as you want to claim with "plod". None of this is treated by Rolf. And it's a problem for his work, because he relies on the assumption that semantics is uncancellable meaning and he is all about finding the semantics of the BH verbal system.

I think it's better to define a prototypical meaning and allow for non-prototypical uses. I wrote in my review:

"Chapter two (“Methodology, definitions, and text”) moves to methodological issues. Furuli critiques the modern tendency, at least in biblical studies, towards discourse analysis, suggesting that an approach similar to that of the natural sciences in which the smallest independent language units are studied is preferable. He argues that “[t]here is no reason to believe that what is stored in the mind are clauses or sentences or higher units, but rather single concepts, each one being signalled by one word” (p. 28). Furuli here seems oblivious to work, particularly in construction grammar, which demonstrates that constructions themselves are also mentally stored alongside lexical stock traditionally associated with the mental lexicon. Blindly, then, Furuli proceeds to outline the nature of lexical mental conceptualization without any reference to grammatical constructions. He states that “[i]t seems psycholinguists are correct when they say that the central part, or the nucleus, of [the mental concept triggered by a lexical word] tends to be relatively clear, but the concept becomes more dim or fuzzy the further away from the nucleus we proceed” (p. 28). As will be demonstrated further below, Furuli’s (partially-true) psycholinguistic insight here is actually in conflict with his advanced methodology. Moreover, it is even to some extent erroneous: moving away from the prototypical meaning of a word to non-prototypical meaning (Furuli’s “dim” and “fuzzy” above) does not have to entail that the prototypical meaning (Furuli’s “nucleus”) is retained in such non-prototypical uses. In other words, meaning is not static, and it is not simply non-referentiality which produces linguistic fuzziness (pp. 28–29) but also the related issues of grammaticalization; constructional narrowing, widening, or even neutralization of prototypical meaning; and some semantic regions which seem typologically prone to multifunctionality (a large number of examples is provided towards the end of the review). It is thus important to note that when Furuli relates his lexical discussion to what he calls “morphosyntactic words” -- instances of which are verbal conjugations -- by saying that they are “non-referential” and as such “their concepts … [are] much more fuzzy” (p. 28), what he means by this is not that prototypical meaning can be altered -- as is actually admitted in prototype theory in psycholinguistics!"

"From this basis, the chapter moves to a discussion of methodology proper. Here Furuli states (pp. 31–32):

In the study of the verbal system of a dead language, informants are lacking, so the question is: By what means can we hope to find the meaning of the smallest units of this verbal system as the Hebrews understood it? When we choose a methodology, it is extremely important to differentiate between the parts that have an intrinsic meaning that never change, and those parts whose meaning is dependent upon the context and are changeable. So we should differentiate between semantics and pragmatics.

"Just why such a differentiation is “extremely important” remains unstated. More significantly, it is simply assumed that “intrinsic meaning that never change[s]” is a linguistic reality, and remains throughout the work as an unsubstantiated assumption. However, the corollary of admitting to lexical fuzziness within linguistics is generally that there is not necessarily an attribute or set of attributes which is applicable across the uses of any given lexical item (or syntactic construction, etc.) such that non-prototypical uses may only optionally carry an attribute or set of attributes essential to more central use(s). In other words, “they may show what is often called family resemblances or a radial structure, i.e., each meaning is linked by resemblance to some other meaning, but the network of meanings may be so large that meanings at different ends of it show no traces of similarities.”"

I have just pasted the main text. There's copious footnotes which provide references to the linguistic literature where my points are demonstrated and defended.



Note, I have not defended Rolf, he may be wrong too, but your
arguments and criticism that you have presented so far has been based
on dialectal experience and solipsism, hardly the grounds for
dispassionate, scholarly study.

Karl, all I've been doing here is interacting with the example Rolf gave and asked for me to disprove. Since it is an English example, I can really only approach it from my own familiarity and knowledge of the language. Again, I repeat: From you point of view. Yet the question still remains: for those who see semantic meaning as uncancellable meaning, which is the semantics of "plod" in such a non-standard dialect (to use your terms)? If uncancellable meaning is supposed to exist, please show the uncancellable meaning of "plod" across the examples we've been considering.

But like I said before, these pages and pages of documentation I gave in my review where such uncancellable meaning cannot be discerned that cannot be put down to "dialectal experience and solipsism". That's not a fair claim, esp. as you seem to have not read the review as so are not in a position to say that my presentation there is only one of "dialectal experience and solipsism".


Karl W. Randolph.


Regards,
David Kummerow.




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