From: Mike Sangrey (mike@sojurn.lns.pa.us)
Date: Fri Jul 28 2000 - 09:00:53 EDT
I apologize for not answering this sooner--lots of `to do' to be done.
Francisco Orozco <reformer@hmo.megared.net.mx> said:
> Mike Sangrey wrote in part,
> [3] An interesting research project would be to map the words
> in a letter, say Philippians, to semantic domains. Then ask, and
> answer the question, "What semantic domains function analogously to a
> Global VIP?" One would use the techniques of participant reference,
> articularity, point of departure, etc. I suspect that the major
> theme(s) of the letter would naturally show prominence and you
> would have objective evidence as support it. I also suspect the
> major breaks in the letter would also surface.
> Could you explain a bit more what this research project would involve?
> (If you could give me an actual example, let say from a few verses in
> Phil). Are there books that directly deal with this?
I started wondering about this when I noticed that Louw & Nida (L&N)
place FRONEW, EXW, and LOGIZOMAI in the same semantic domain (namely
31.1, "hold a view") and that cumulatively, these three words are used
22 times in Philippians (FRONEW alone is 10). It made me think of Euodia
and Syntyche who are plead with "to agree"; an event which seems
to "jump out" from the text as salient.
OBVIOUSLY, there would be different usages of the words in specific
contexts. For example, the three words above fall into other semantic
domains that do not correlate with each other. Which semantic domain
would have to be determined by analysis of each occurrence. And that
would form the tedious part of the work. Lexical semantics is at least
as complex as other semantical levels and is exacerbated by the lack
of explicit context. So, the assignments will be the most difficult
to support.
Then one would need to do a discourse analysis of the entire text,
noting the semantic domains of prominent nominals. This abstracts the
semantics slightly and would, hopefully, expose correlation between
the various prominent nominals. Thus you would establish support for
a theme or themes.
Along with the discourse analysis, you would have to work out some way
of indicating referents, pronouns being the most obvious. You would
want to capture and use the semantic domain of the referent and not the
pronoun itself, for example.
Also, L&N low level semantic domains are too fine. However, their
subdomains may work rather well.
As far as books: You would need Louw and Nida. There have been some
discourse analyses done on Philippians, but doing it yourself (I'm
not there )-: ) would quicken your intuition. Sheffield Academic Press,
http://www.sheffield.com, has published at least one and I think SIL,
http://www.sil.org, has, too. SIL also has several helps in discourse
analysis, and there easily are several people on this list more
knowledgeable than I in the fields required.
Overall, this is a gut level guess from a little greek. Though it is
based on the correlation between the analytical feature of `prominence'
and the holistic feature of `thematic content'. The worst that would
come from it would be substantial experience in discourse analysis,
and a sound knowledge of Philippians. IMO, that would be very valuable.
Lastly BTW, one reason I mentioned it was to see if there was any
reaction to the thought. I received nothing negative. :-)
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