Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Semantic Range, Lexicography, and other approaches to word meaning - in general, or for particular words.
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote: October 16th, 2021, 5:36 pm ... I'm not sure if it leads to thinking that the words are less referential.
Perhaps my current preoccupation with early church fathers makes me aware of ontological implications of referential language in the bible. Non-referential has a simple meaning. There is nothing there.

Cognitive Frames are a means of understanding how humans process language.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: October 16th, 2021, 5:14 pm Here are the concepts his words evoked in my mind, at any rate:

When two living Americans speak modern English with each other, we grew up in similar embodied experience. When we read ancient texts, much more of what we read about is outside of our lived experience, I do not know what those sandals felt like or what it looked and felt like to walk from Jerusalem to Jericho, I have not reclined at table to eat the kinds of foods that they had at the Last Supper, I have not grown up hearing Hellenistic Greek used to explain the concepts in the embodied world I grew up in. My conceptual framework for Hellenistic Greek was developed via a much more artificial, less embodied process. Well, slightly more embodied now, thanks to some living language experience, but still ... if we choose a denotational framework, these words denote things in a world I have not experienced directly.

And that affects our approach to lexicography and lexical semantics. We are trying to carefully catalog a conceptual world that is not native to us, in which we have limited embodied experience, much of that artificially constructed by people who are trying to reconstruct it.

That's how I understood it, at any rate. I don't know if Will will return and confirm whether I got it right and clarify what I got wrong after the way this thread went.
All that’s fine and good, but it still seems weird to me to make referentiality a property of the language instead of the context. When you speak Koine in a living language situation, it’s still just as referential as present day English, right?
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
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