Biblical words are nolonger referential?

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

Post by William Ross »

How nice that I could be sort of helpful and get implicitly batched in with mid-20th century atheist apologists for a brief offhand comment I made on a podcast. Strange I don't visit this forum more often! I answered the question in basic form and don't really have much interest in expanding further. Enjoy.
​William A. Ross
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Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

William Ross wrote: October 15th, 2021, 3:53 pm get implicitly batched in with mid-20th century atheist apologists for a brief offhand comment I made on a podcast.
I don't think being batched in with atheist apologists is an insult here. :) Doubting competency in linguistics is, which I did more or less implicitly or explicitly. My apologies for that.

Even if some who have written academic works have participated here, it's still rare, and reading all kinds of things without being able to get first hand clarification is often frustrating and leads to speculation when I'm trying to understand what others are saying. It's difficult enough even with those who write here. Therefore I appreciate very much if someone educates me.
Barry Hofstetter
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

William Ross wrote: October 15th, 2021, 3:53 pm How nice that I could be sort of helpful and get implicitly batched in with mid-20th century atheist apologists for a brief offhand comment I made on a podcast. Strange I don't visit this forum more often! I answered the question in basic form and don't really have much interest in expanding further. Enjoy.
I'm the one who made that comment, not either implicitly or explicitly to batch you in with such folks, but that the statement reminded me of those kind of arguments, with a desire for a bit of clarification. I have been at Greek for a while, but picked up what linguistics I have over a period of time without formal study of the subject, so understanding what you meant (and in the context of a lot of interesting material in the podcast) would be helpful to me, if no one else. For example, to get to the heart of the matter, does θεός have a referent, and is that different from what almost everyone would agree is an imaginary construct, the famous unicorn example?
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
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καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

Eeli Kaikkonen wrote: October 15th, 2021, 5:45 pm
William Ross wrote: October 15th, 2021, 3:53 pm get implicitly batched in with mid-20th century atheist apologists for a brief offhand comment I made on a podcast.
I don't think being batched in with atheist apologists is an insult here. :) Doubting competency in linguistics is, which I did more or less implicitly or explicitly. My apologies for that.

Even if some who have written academic works have participated here, it's still rare, and reading all kinds of things without being able to get first hand clarification is often frustrating and leads to speculation when I'm trying to understand what others are saying. It's difficult enough even with those who write here. Therefore I appreciate very much if someone educates me.
Yes. We don't get to talk back to many authors. I have an article[1] addressing
The Cognitive Notion of “Frames of Reference” which I have read several times since it was published. I have read numerous monographs by people from SIL and UBS who talked about cognitive frames. I was mystified by the treatment in "Framing the Frames" it seemed as if the people who spend their entire careers studying these issues have difficulties communicating with their peers. Examples of this are not difficult to find.



[1] Journal of Translation, Volume 6, number 1 (2010) 27
Framing the Frames: A Theoretical Framework for the Cognitive Notion of “Frames of Reference”
Ernst R. Wendland
Ernst Wendland has been an instructor at the Lutheran Seminary in Lusaka, Zambia, since 1968. He is a United Bible Societies Translation Consultant, emeritus, and is currently affiliated as a visiting professor in the Department of Ancient Studies with the Centre for Bible Interpretation and Translation at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

In looking over Framing the Frames: A Theoretical Framework for the Cognitive Notion of “Frames of Reference” now after years have passed I don't see what the problem was with it initially.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

I'm frustrated with this thread and sympathetic to Will.

My main gripe is that there's a level of fault-finding in this thread that I find inappropriate. It does not feel like "respectful discourse" to me, it does not feel friendly, it does not feel like an open-minded attempt to understand what he was saying. It does not feel grounded in the context of the podcast itself. We may have lost Will as a result, which is a shame, he is precisely the kind of person I would like to attract to B-Greek. I would like to apologize to Will for this.

I have a secondary gripe. I think the podcast explains this reasonably well, and I wonder if going back and listening again wouldn't resolve a lot of the questions. He is basically saying he is using a cognitive semantics approach, which focuses on the relationship between words and concepts, and not a denotational semantics approach, which focuses on the relationship between words and real-world things. He is saying that words are "not necessarily" referential, and he says that words refer to the real world via concepts - words refer to concepts, concepts refer to the real world (but not always) - people bump around in the real world and form concepts to explain it, words refer to these concepts.

Both Will (who leans cognitive) and Paul Kroeger (who leans denotational) agree that these two approaches to semantics do not rule each other out, that they are in part differences in focus and emphasis. The weakness of pure denotational semantics is that it fails to take mental representation into account - hypothetical things that cannot be encountered in the real world, different ways of classifying things in languages and cultures, cultural frames, etc. The weakness of pure cognitive semantics is that our knowledge of mental processing is limited. In practice, I think most people use both approaches, whether they are aware of that or not.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stirling Bartholomew wrote: October 16th, 2021, 3:11 pm In looking over Framing the Frames: A Theoretical Framework for the Cognitive Notion of “Frames of Reference” now after years have passed I don't see what the problem was with it initially.
Added a link to the PDF.

I need to read this again, but this section may make cognitive semantics and frames more concrete for people who think in terms of discourse. Think about how concepts are brought into scope as you read - not because the set of things that exist in the real world changes as you read, but because the concepts that are in scope change as you read. These concepts are built by our interaction with the real world, but for human beings, the real world is always mediated by our concepts.
Contextual frame theory was developed in order to understand how readers track references to
characters and events through the process of reading. The basic notion involves the idea of a
contextual frame, a mental representation of the circumstances containing the current context. This is
built up from the text itself as well as from inferences drawn directly from the text.... A reader must
thus keep track of which information applies in any particular context, and this knowledge is arranged
in terms of contextual frames. These are not simply ̳snapshots‘ of successive moments across the
narrative, however, but are a series of ongoing and shifting mental representations of the world of the
literary work.... Though readers need to hold several contextual frames in mind, the current point of
reading forms the main frame in focus.... As the narrative moves on, different contexts move into the
primary focus: the current frame that is being monitored is said to be primed. Characters, objects and
the location of the main context currently being monitored are all bound to that frame and primed too.
When the reader‘s attention is taken elsewhere, that frame and all its contents become unprimed
(Stockwell 2002:155–156).

Placing nonfocal information in [the] clause-initial position has the effect of establishing an explicit
frame of reference for the clause that follows. It does not result in emphasis. By definition, emphasis
refers to taking what was already most important in a clause and placing it in [syntactic position two]
at the beginning of the clause. Frames of reference are used to highlight the introduction of a new
topic or center of interest in the discourse. They are also used to attract attention to a discontinuity in
the discourse in order to help the reader/hearer properly process it. Contrast is not created by the use
of frames of reference, though it may increase it (Runge 2010:224–225
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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Stephen Carlson
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: October 16th, 2021, 3:22 pm I have a secondary gripe. I think the podcast explains this reasonably well, and I wonder if going back and listening again wouldn't resolve a lot of the questions.
I did listen to that part of the podcast and I am familiar with the literature, but I’m still befuddled by his “no longer”. I suspect he simply misspoke.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote: October 16th, 2021, 4:00 pm
Jonathan Robie wrote: October 16th, 2021, 3:22 pm I have a secondary gripe. I think the podcast explains this reasonably well, and I wonder if going back and listening again wouldn't resolve a lot of the questions.
I did listen to that part of the podcast and I am familiar with the literature, but I’m still befuddled by his “no longer”. I suspect he simply misspoke.
This is approximately what he said:
Semantic structure is conceptual structure. Conceptual structure rises from embodied experience. What does it mean for biblical languages? Biblical languages are ancient languages, they are no longer referential in the same sense that the English we speak today is referential. Although they are not referential, they do have meaning, words have meaning in spite of the fact that they do not have reference. And that's true for current languages too, this is why you can have words like unicorn, though there is no unicorn out there to refer to, there is still a concept associated with the word, and that concept is derived from lived experience. And the same thing is true of biblical languages, they have meaning despite not having reference.
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.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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Eeli Kaikkonen
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Re: Biblical words are nolonger referential?

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

Jonathan Robie wrote: October 16th, 2021, 3:22 pm My main gripe is that there's a level of fault-finding in this thread that I find inappropriate.
Yes, I'm guilty. I still reserve the right to make the same question with Stephen (what does "no longer" mean, under any framework), but otherwise what I said and my reasoning were inappropriate.
He is basically saying he is using a cognitive semantics approach, which focuses on the relationship between words and concepts, and not a denotational semantics approach, which focuses on the relationship between words and real-world things. He is saying that words are "not necessarily" referential, and he says that words refer to the real world via concepts - words refer to concepts, concepts refer to the real world (but not always) - people bump around in the real world and form concepts to explain it, words refer to these concepts.
I agree with this, which didn't make understanding "no longer" any easier. The difference between now and then is that because of the time and cultural differences we don't understand their words or text in the same way than they did, but that's not loosing referentiality. I tried to understand this by making assumption that someone could think that because we modern people don't no longer see their concepts as belonging to real world they have lost their reference. And I think if someone really thinks that way, they don't understand linguistics.

Letting this form a prejudice without any attempt to know better and writing it here was inappropriate.

EDIT: I'm not sure if I totally grasp what Jonathan explains in the post above. I agree we have lost the original experience, but I'm not sure if it leads to thinking that the words are less referential.
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