Yes, I think so. We can certainly discuss how words are used in any given passage or in a given period (by looking at specific passages). We can look at the way meaning of a word evolves over time. Reading an entire passage as a passage to get its context is always in scope. Metaphorical extensions and cognitive linguistics are in scope.Jonathan Robie wrote: ↑June 6th, 2020, 5:01 pm
Another point I'd like to make with both of you guys, that also might be considered off-topic, so I'll just mention it. It is that authors aren't necessarily constrained by established usage of a word. They can bring new meanings into words (or resurrect dead meanings, I would think). I've been thinking about some examples of that. Sometimes those new meanings enter the language as permanent fixtures and sometimes not. Is there any way we can talk about that a little without violating BGreek policy?
In general, we want to avoid letting doctrine or theory impose themselves on the text, we would rather let the text tell us what it says. B-Greek policy is meant to encourage that. But there are times to bring other things in to inform the meaning of a text. I dodged your question of literary analysis earlier in this thread. Phenomenological analysis or other text-centric literary analysis would be fine, but there are also forms of literary analysis that are driven by one "ism" or another, we try to avoid those here. If you use text-centric approaches to get at the meaning of the text, you don't normally need to tell us the mechanics of the approach you used or use fancy words, just tell us the details you notice in the text.
Does that make sense?
The main goal is to:
1. Focus on the text and the language
2. Avoid useless debates and read carefully together
3. Focus on learning together and not on status or impressing each other
[/quote]
I spent a couple of hours writing a response to this, but in the meantime my login timed out, and after logging in what I wrote is gone. Maybe I'll try again later.