From: Mike Sangrey (msangrey@BlueFeltHat.org)
Date: Fri Jul 27 2001 - 10:09:21 EDT
"Richard Allan Stauch" <RStauch@worldnet.att.net> said:
[a bunch of writing, without punctuation, which I understood quite
well]
Thanks Richard, the object lesson made me think.
All I wish to add is:
When we talk about words, sentences, paragraphs, sections (and
subsections), and discourses, we need to ask ourselves whether
we are talking about the syntax (ie the form) or are we talking
about the semantics (ie the meaning).
Is jukastit a word? According to form, yes; according to meaning, no.
Was Richard's "sentences" sentences? Somewhat no and yes--there is
more to a syntactic sentence than just punctuation.
I recently read and outlined a chapter in a linguistics book. One
paragraph gave me particular trouble. Turns out it had two main
thoughts and the author didn't break the semantic paragraph into
two syntactic paragraphs. It separated quite easily between two
sentences and then the outline became easy for me to do. Apparently,
to her mind the two thoughts were closely related; maybe similar to
the way we join two sentences with a semicolon, but only at the
paragraph level.
In other words, in an imperfect world there is skewing between
the syntactic and the semantic. My gut level feeling is that the
skewing is caused by imperfect definitions of extremely highly
complex phenomena which map the one to the other. We trip since
we are not fully cognizant of the skewing. How do I know that?
We use identical vocabulary in the two different senses of
syntactic and semantic and sometimes unconsciously slide back
and forth between the two. Tricky, tricky, tricky.
-- Mike Sangrey msangrey@BlueFeltHat.org Landisburg, Pa. "The first one last wins." "A net of highly cohesive details reveals the truth."--- B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [jwrobie@mindspring.com] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-327Q@franklin.oit.unc.edu To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
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