Porter et al - James Barr Assessed

Lexicons, Grammars, Reading Guides, History, Culture, and Background
Matthew Longhorn
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Re: Porter et al - James Barr Assessed

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

In his chapter “James Barr, Semantic Domains, and the Mental Lexicon” Sean A. Adams provides a very short summary of the history of lexicography. His primary focus is, however, on the benefits and drawbacks of Louw and Nida’s lexicon based on semantic domains, as well as possible advancements that can be made. One such proposed advancement is to create author specific semantic lexicons.

Adams identifies a number of issues with Louw and Nida
1. “It imposes a structure that might not be compatible with the language in focus”
2. “Insufficient study has been given to understanding the kinds of relationships that occur among words within a given language”
3. “…there is substantial difficulty in determining the boundaries of semantic domains, how they are divided and how the could or should be organised”
4. Regarding the codex form of lexicons he notes “The most important issues for our discussion are its linearity and its inability to connect entries with ease. Both detriments prohibit substantial integration and nodal connections of lexemes”.

Adams moves on to discuss the concept of a mental lexicon which is essentially person specific and not a comprehensive list of all possible lexemes. In this mental lexicon there are different strengths of associations between words in one speaker compared to another. This lexicon is also continually updated. The implications for this are pretty wide ranging, but one key one he identifies is that no mental lexicon will be identical between speakers. There will be different connections and different strengths of connections.
Regarding how the mental lexicon applies to issues of authorship Adams in footnote 43 on page 173 states (among other things) “Ones decisions about authorship directly affect the contents of our Pauline mental lexicon. It is possible that distinctive connections among words could be used as a criterion for discussions of authorship”

The concept of the mental lexicon reminds me of something I recently read by an author called Martin Hilpter. Hilpert in his recent book 10 Lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar gives an example of one person encountering a construction where there are two distinct groups of words that it is used with. Each group is semantically related internally, but no correspondence between the two groups. If the user encountered a use outside these groups they may not see this new use as acceptable. If, however the spread of words encountered with the construction was more even and not so tightly grouped, then the judgement of acceptability would be altered.

The fifth section of Adams’ chapter deals with Paul and his mental lexicon. Two main examples are given
1. The relationship between περιτομή and ἀκροβυστία in Romans 4:9-12. Here Adam’s shows that these words are conceptually linked in Paul’s mind despite being in entirely different semantic domains in Louw and Nida. This shows that the groupings in that lexicon aren’t universally applicable and miss speaker specific nuances.
2. The link between νεκρόω and domain 23 of Louw and Nida (Physiological Processes and States) in Colossians 2:6-34. Here the lack of linkage between νεκρόω and any other domains is seen as problematic as it is linked to larger themes of life and death in the previous section.

Adams does list some issues with his proposal of author specific lexicons.
1. Our available corpus is small for many authors
2. We risk imposing modern categories on ancient authors. He states, for example “There is no evidence that Paul divided his lexical world into the ninety-three different categories expressed by Louw-Nida.”

As possible further avenues to develop an author specific lexicon a couple of options are given
1. Look at the sources an author uses
2. Look at how translations of an author render a text and sometimes use more than one word to express the different nuances of a single word in the source language.


For anyone interested, Hilpert’s book that I mentioned earlier is available for free download at Brill’s website. The audio of the lectures is also provided for free. https://brill.com/view/title/56854
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Porter et al - James Barr Assessed

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Thanks for that. I’m not aware, however, of a single argument that was founded on LN semantic domains (but I haven’t read anything). Is this really a risk of using the lexicon? For me, its structure doubles as a handy thesaurus and I wouldn’t dream of making an argument based on how Roget would classify a word.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Matthew Longhorn
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Re: Porter et al - James Barr Assessed

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

Stephen Carlson wrote: October 2nd, 2021, 5:22 pm Thanks for that. I’m not aware, however, of a single argument that was founded on LN semantic domains (but I haven’t read anything). Is this really a risk of using the lexicon? For me, its structure doubles as a handy thesaurus and I wouldn’t dream of making an argument based on how Roget would classify a word.
I can recall some instances of the use of LN semantic domains, but am not sure they were in particularly academic material. My wider concern is that on such limited works from NT authors there is a danger of accidental collocations. Imagine for example trying to do this work on Jude!
Matthew Longhorn
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Re: Porter et al - James Barr Assessed

Post by Matthew Longhorn »

For those not on Nerdy Biblical Language Majors facebook group, a… why not? B, here is a summary of another chapter that I posted there when I wasn’t able to connect to b-greek


The first chapter I jumped into was from part 2 of the book, and was written by Gene L. Green, entitled “The Semantics if Biblical Language: Reflections from Relevance Theory and Lexical Pragmatics”.

Gene commends Barr’s argument that we cannot capture concept by reference to a word. Concepts grow out of the context that words are used in, and this includes co-textual context as well as wider knowledge of usage outside the Biblical texts in question. This for Barr came in as a critique of Kittel’s dictionary TWNT / TDNT.

Green early on notes that the use of sentence diagramming to get to the meaning of a biblical text is not enough. Diagramming reflects an emphasis on linguistic structure as the carrier of meaning, rather than as a conduit to it (to borrow a term from later in his chapter). The missing component to bring out meaning is pragmatics, and this works in conjunction with semantics. Commenting on Barr’s emphasis on semantics Green on page 146 states “Barr placed his hopes in semantics but semantic models are inadequate in and of themselves to describe the complex nature of human communication, whether in the days of the biblical authors or our own”

A lot of the chapter focuses, as might be expected, on a discussion of the concepts found in Relevance Theory (RT). Underdeterminacy, ostensive inferential communication, communicative intent, informative intent etc are all given some space, although his main sections focus on context, on explicature and implicatures, ad hoc concept formation, and of course relevance itself.

Interaction with biblical passages is very limited in this chapter, which is fair given the space he has to pay out key concepts and interact with Barr. The passages he touches on are 1 These 5:3 (pages 149-150), John 2:3 (pages 154-155), Matthew 26:26 (page 159)

Regarding 1 Thess 5:3 (ὅταν ⸆ λέγωσιν· εἰρήνη καὶ ἀσφάλεια, τότε αἰφνίδιος ⸂αὐτοῖς ἐφίσταται⸃ ὄλεθρος ὥσπερ ἡ ὠδὶν τῇ ἐν γαστρὶ ἐχούσῃ, καὶ οὐ μὴ ⸀ἐκφύγωσιν.) Green uses it to demonstrate the application of reference assignment, disambiguation and enrichment. We need to work out who “they” refers to in this passage (reference assignment), and identify the kind of peace and security being described (disambiguation). We also need to identify what it is that the “they” will not escape from (enrichment). The specific words themselves don’t give us this meaning, but a mixture of the information from the context and other (encyclopaedic knowledge) etc are needed.

In his discussion of the wedding in Cana passage in John 2:3 (καὶ ⸂ὑστερήσαντος οἴνου⸃ λέγει ἡ μήτηρ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ πρὸς αὐτόν· ⸄οἶνον οὐκ ἔχουσιν⸅) Green uses it to discuss (among other things) contextual assumptions, cognitive effects and relevance guided comprehension heuristics (he doesn’t use the term) wherein a person will stop interpreting an utterance once their expectations of relevance are met. On other words Jesus didn’t try to understand every possible meaning of “they have no wine”. He stopped when he combined this sentence with his knowledge of Jewish weddings and the role of wine and possible shame where wine runs out at a wedding. Jesus also recognises this statement as a request, that his mother knows he can remedy the situation and therefore it is unlikely to be a simple assertion. Green points out that “no amount of lexical or syntactical analysis would have been sufficient for Jesus or any reader of this text to understand the meaning of Mary’s utterance. The meaning communicated in her utterance is a combination of the semantic structures and inferred contextual information” (pg 155)

I am going to skip over the majority of discussion of ad hoc concepts as this isn’t a formal review, however it is worth reading. I will, however, cite most of his his reference of Patrick Hanks “… It is a convenient shorthand to talk about “the meanings of words in a dictionary,” but strictly speaking these are not meanings at all. Rather, they are “meaning potentials” - potential contributions to the meanings of texts and conversations in which the words are used, and activated by the speaker who uses them”. (Pg 158)
It is in the context of his discussion of ad hoc concepts that Green touches on Matthew 26:26. Ἐσθιόντων δὲ αὐτῶν⸊ λαβὼν ὁ Ἰησοῦς ⸆ ἄρτον ⸂καὶ εὐλογήσας⸃ ἔκλασεν καὶ ⸄δοὺς τοῖς μαθηταῖς⸅ εἶπεν· λάβετε φάγετε, τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου.
He sees lexical narrowing in the verb Eat where it no longer means eating in general, but “a particular type of eating associated with the community and Passover”. Jesus’ body here illustrates category extension, where the category of body has been broadened to now be associated with the bread.

It was a good chapter, however, given the space it isn’t an in-depth analysis related to the biblical text, for that you will have to look to his journal articles. He does reference and absolutely wonderful book called “Relevance-Theoretic Lexical Pragmatics” by Wałaszewska - I seriously recommend this short book, it was a massive eye opener for me.
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/produ ... 438-8073-2
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