Ruth, It is my understanding that (SH means "to make, do, perform" Do you think I am incorrect in that?
David KolinskyMonterey, CA ________________________________ From: Ruth Mathys <[email protected]> To: b-hebrew <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, May 10, 2013 5:21:42 PM Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Lexemes and meanings Karl asked: > However, in what way is my usage idiosyncratic? Please let me quote some sentences that I read just last night (in Croft and Cruse, _Cognitive Linguistics_, 2004, p. 258): >> The term 'meaning' is intended to represent all of the conventionalized >> aspects of a construction's function... We will use the terms 'meaning' and >> 'semantic' to refer to any conventionalized function of a construction. Notice how the authors expressly link meaning to *function*. A construction is the form, and the meaning is the function of that form. Think about a table. The *form* of a table is one or more legs with a flat surface on top. The *function* of a table is to be a convenient place to put things on. Or a train: the form of a train is an engine linking carriages. The function of a train is to move people and goods from one place to another. These are a couple of examples of form and function. In language, the form could be a string of sounds, a string of hand/body movements, a string of marks on paper... At a different level, the form is a word, a sentence, a grammatical construction... But the *function* of language is always to communicate, to mean. This thread should be discussing how a form -- a lexeme and its context -- performs a function -- to create meaning. To put any aspect of meaning onto the 'form' side of the form-function equation is so idiosyncratic as to baffle intelligent discussion. I came upon a good example of a lexeme which I hope we can discuss in a way that we all benefit from. Not an obscure example ;-) but I'm still a relative beginner so it caught me by surprise. Normally with עשה I expect the direct object to be a product, either concrete (e.g. a house) or metaphorical (e.g. a deed). So I was a bit surprised to read a sentence where the direct object was a person. In this case it wasn't God creating somebody ex nihilo; there was ל plus a second noun to say what God was turning the person into. So the unusual object, plus the change of syntax in the sentence (the addition of a prepositional phrase), alerted me to a change in meaning for the verb. It doesn't have its usual meaning of creating something out of nothing; instead, it means to change the status of something that already exists. Looking in my dictionary, I see that there is an interesting subset of this meaning. If the agent is a human being (not God) and the object is an animal, and the context is talking about sacrifice, then the meaning is to offer the animal as a sacrifice. Again, there is a shift from creating something to changing the status of something. Apparently there is sometimes a prepositional phrase to explicate the meaning of 'use as a sacrifice', but not always. It seems to be a technical term in sacrifice contexts. Karl, I notice that you didn't interact at all with my English examples of words that change meaning depending on their syntactic context ("She has class" / "She has a class now"). I hope you will be willing to discuss this Hebrew example. How do you account for the different syntactic usages of עשה in your dictionary? Ruth Mathys _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
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