[B-Greek] ACTS 15:1 TWi EQEI TWi MWUSEWS

Randall Buth ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Tue Aug 1 09:07:53 EDT 2006


 >
 >Randall Buth wrote:
 >> Meaning, of course, is negotiated within a system and one way to
 >> approach a somewhat unclear context is to consider what was not
 >> chosen.
...
 >This is exactly the point I was hoping someone would make. "... a
 >general relationship between 'to be circumcised' and Mosaic practice."
 >
 >My contention is that overly specific labels "dative of rule" give a
 >misleading analysis since they imply that the author intended to nail
 >something down with the dative case whereas the author actually
 >intended to leave it open-ended assuming that the reader could supply
 >from their own knowledge what was only suggested in the text. I think
 >this somehow relates to relevance theory but it has been a few years
 >and I am foggy on that topic.
 >
 >Elizabeth Kline

Yes, the previous email would be an example of doing relevance theory  
but without explaining the procedures or labeling the terms.  
Relevance theory is a theorectical framework for explaining what goes  
on in the continunal process of human communication.

More importantly, these comments can illustrate the difference  
between working within a language and transferring everything outside  
of the language into a foreign environment. There are two items of  
note here.

1. The meaning of a word is itself AND 'not the other options'.  
Practically, this means that looking a word up in a lexicon is not  
the whole picture or the whole meaning. The definition in the lexicon  
may be correct, but the lexicon rarely provides all of the other  
options that the author did not choose.
that process is on-going whenever someone is processing a message in  
any language. Then, as soon as that message is placed in another  
language, a myriad very little changes and choices are substituted  
into place.

2. Labeling grammatical functions can be misleading if people think  
that the labels are an explicit part of the communication. It is  
frequently the case, as you point out above, that the well-meaning  
label introduces something extra into the message that was not in the  
original. I am more sensitive to this in Hebrew where we get students  
who 'etymologize' things into words and structures that are not part  
of any live communication process. In most cases the students are not  
aware of what they are doing because that is the way that they were  
taught. It's just that the language doesn't actually work the way  
that they imagine. Usually, this makes no difference because a skewed  
focus sorts itself out in the continuing context/communication. On  
rare occasions it's funny.

ERRWSO
ερρωσο
(Unicode does usually slip thru. Any year now, it will be in the list.)
Randall Buth







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