Dave: On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Dave Washburn <[email protected]>wrote:
> >A second point that I’ve noticed is that when one looks at a term that > appears to have multiple meanings, when one looks at the underlying > >action, what one finds is the same action applied to different contexts. > > I'd be interested to see more development of this idea, because I've > noticed just the opposite: words mean what they mean because a society > chooses to use them that way. An English examples is "strike", which mean > "hit" in bowling but "miss" in baseball. > “Strike” is brought up repeatedly, as the exception that proves the rule. Even within baseball, the use includes a “hit”, an indication that here we’re talking about a very specialized use of the term. The same is true in bowling, a specialized type of “hit”. > > >A third point, one must differentiate between simple lexemes and complex > lexemes. A complex lexeme is where two or more words are >combined to give > a different meaning than what each single word has: e.g. “to fish out” has > a different meaning than “to fish”. > > I think you're describing an idiom with this example. I'm not sure there's > a difference between an idiomatic usage and a "complex lexeme," but there > it is. > > A complex lexeme is where two terms used together make a meaning that is not included in either term used independently. An idiom can be a complex lexeme, or often a single term, used in a way that often softens harsh reality, e.g. in Biblical Hebrew, )BD “to be(come) lost” used idiomatically to refer to death. A similar example from English in a conversation talking about a person’s death, the context indicates “He passed last Thursday” uses “passed” as a shortened use of the idiom “passed away” to refer to “died”. These uses fit within the “few exceptions” I mentioned in my previous message. Karl W. Randolph.
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