[B-Greek] Wallace or Porter?
Elizabeth Kline
kline-dekooning at earthlink.net
Fri Sep 16 13:37:59 EDT 2005
On Sep 16, 2005, at 9:28 AM, CWestf5155 at aol.com wrote:
> Elizabeth,
>
> I want to apologize for taking more than two weeks to respond to
> your inquiry. I had various distractions, technical and professional.
No problem. I have had some major distractions as well.
>
> Porter would not take Relevance Theory (RL)as a starting point
> because it "lacks rigour". Stan is focused on the patterns of the
> formal features of the grammar and what they can mean--he's much
> more interested in the patterns of what is actually there rather
> than what is missing.
I share the concern about "rigour" and had serious reservations about
cognitive approaches to linguistics and Relevance Theory in
particular. Recently the value of Relevance Theory has become
apparent. Why is Homer easier to read than most Attic Tragedy? The
story in the Iliad has a high level of information redundancy. On
McLuhan's hot -- cool spectrum (Understanding Media 1964) the Iliad
is to the left (hot) of Euripides (considered by some easy reading).
Euripides only suggests where Homer tells you explicitly in detail
several times over. The biblical texts are all to the left (hot) of
Euripides. A student who goes from reading the NT/LXX to Homer will
need to learn a new dialect but the same student who picks up
Euripides will have a lot of difficulty that has nothing to do with
dialect differences. Relevance Theory provides a framework for
understanding some of these difficulties.
Elizabeth Kline
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