[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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