Campbell: Advances Chapter 3

[Paul-Nitz]

This thread is for discussing Con Campbell's book, Advances in the Study of Greek (2015) Chapter Three:
“Lexical Semantics and Lexicography”


The chapter describes the Symbol-Sense-Referent model – a Symbol is the word, the Sense is the meaning conveyed, the Referent is that objective thing that the word points to.

It describes Synonymy, versus synonymous. Like a Venn diagram, two words can refer to the same thing, but each word will have a fuller meaning. The two will not likely overlap perfectly.

It talks about Context. I appreciated learning the tems for different types of context: literary, context of situation (why is this writer writing, and to whom), historical, and reception context (the history of interpretation affects how we read it today).

The rest of the chapter lexical studies. Very instructive. As mentioned in another thread, Danker’s “Concise Greek-English Lexicon of the NT” looks like it would be worth buying. Definitions are given rather than glosses or options for translation.

[Stephen Carlson]

As mentioned in another thread, Danker’s “Concise Greek-English Lexicon of the NT” looks like it would be worth buying. Definitions are given rather than glosses or options for translation.

For my needs, BDAG is better (more detailed, etc.) and it has definitions too. (I don't quite understand the market for a concise edition, and all I know that I'm not in it.) The curious part of this publication is that the Concise GELNT is not an abridgement of BDAG but many definitions are based on a new semantic analysis. I'm not sure, however, the new analyses are an improvement. This is impressionistic on my part and I don't think it's been properly studied.

[Stephen Carlson]

I didn't find the first half of the chapter useful or up to date. The second half, about BDAG and criticisms, is more pertinent.