I've seen it claimed here repeatedly that a single lexeme necessarily has a single meaning in all the contexts it is used in. I think that is nonsense. I won't attempt to prove it from Hebrew, but it is easy to demonstrate from English.
Take the word 'draw'. A horse can draw a cart, or I can draw the curtains -- that means that some agent is pulling an object. For 'draw', I can substitute words like 'pull', 'tug', 'tow', etc. On the other hand, I can draw a picture -- in this case the agent is creating a product. For 'draw', I can substitute words like 'create', 'paint', 'sketch', etc. There is absolutely no overlap in meaning. And yet I think most English speakers would say that it is the same word in both contexts, perhaps linked by a now-lost stage of meaning where the implement is pulled across the page to create the image. But the shift in the nature of the verb's object proves that the two meanings are distinct. Another word that has been suggested for multiple meanings is 'strike'. I can strike a ball, verb + object. Or I can strike for better work conditions, intransitive verb with a goal. My native-speaker intuition says that it is the same word both times, but I can't see what the connection is between the two meanings. I can't see any residual notion of 'hit' in the 'refuse to work' meaning. And again, the two meanings have different syntactic contexts. Third example: 'class'. Wool can be sorted into different classes. Students can be sorted into different classes. In this case, the substitute words would be 'grade', 'category', 'level', etc. If I say I'm late for class, that is obviously a development from the previous meaning, but the substitute words are different -- 'school', 'seminar', 'session'. And if I say that somebody's action shows class, it's a different area of meaning again -- 'high quality', 'impressiveness'. Just because the meanings can be shown to derive historically from each other doesn't make them the same. The syntactic context is really important too. Back to lurking. Ruth Mathys _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
