[B-Greek] Semantics
Elizabeth Kline
kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Sat Oct 13 12:03:51 EDT 2007
On Oct 13, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Iver Larsen wrote:
> The basic insight of Relevance Theory (RT), as it is often called,
> is obviously true and important. It is not really a new discovery,
> but Sperber and Wilson dressed it in new, fancy and IMO often
> misleading terminology. Basically, Relevance Theory says that any
> utterance, whether written or spoken, is made in a particular
> context and situation and the author assumes his or her audience
> will interpret the utterance from their own relevant background
> knowledge.
The significance of frame theory for dealing with lexical semantics
is somewhat independent of RT. I am not terribly excited about RT but
having observed the problems that arise in discussions of lexical
semantics I think frame theory significantly clarifies the notion of
"context and situation". Exegetical works on the GNT have a nasty
habit of using the word "context" as a wild card that can be thrown
into discussion without any sort of clear idea what the term means.
It would be a mistake to equate then notion of a frame with sitz en
lieben. A frame is something that can change instantaneously for a
single individual in a single day. A woman walking in a park talking
to a friend gets a call from work on her cell phone and immediately
she has moved into a different frame where her words will have
different meanings.
Incorporating frames into a semantic domain lexicon presents some
interesting problems. The biggest project is coming up with a an
adequate network of frames to represent the universe of discourse for
a collection of texts like the GNT or the Hebrew Bible.
Elizabeth Kline
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