RE: RE John and Polysemy

Peter Phillips (p.m.phillips@cliff.shef.ac.uk)
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 09:01:22 +0100

I think I am saying almost what you don't want to hear! I would not want
to say that John is suggesting the whole semantic domain whenever he uses a
word. However, he often uses words with more than one meaning. For the
implied reader such usage will mean different things on different readings
of the text - the classic is his use of UPSOW. The problem with Stibbe and
Wead suggesting only double rather than multiple meaning is that sometimes
there are more than two English equivalences to a word.

Now the other problem is in your understanding of what I am saying about
how real readers read texts - and specifically how Greek readers read Greek
texts. John does not suggest the whole semantic domain - the word does.
John doesn't go around using a word and then add a qualifying phrase - "Oh
sorry this is ARXH only in this sense of its semantic domain." He just
uses the words. The context qualifies the semantic domain. The thing with
the Fourth Gospel is that the immediate context may well qualify the
semantic domain towards one way of interpretation while the broader context
of the gospel may well push the semantic field into another area of
interpretation. You see what I mean?

Pete Phillips,
Cliff College, Sheffield, England

p.m.phillips@cliff.shef.ac.uk
http://champness.shef.ac.uk/

-----Original Message-----
From: Clayton Bartholomew [SMTP:c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net]
Sent: 16 July 1997 18:56
To: b-greek
Subject: RE John and Polysemy

Peter Phillips Wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>>
Clearly 'irony' is part and parcel of Johannine
literary technique and depends to some extent upon the diverse semantic
fields of any particular word. It is my own feeling that John makes full
use of the diversity of semantic fields/domains.
>>>>>>>>>>>

I am not sure I follow you on this. Do you mean that in a single instance
of a
single word, John made use of the full semantic domain of that word? If
that
is what you mean then I would take issue with it. I am willing under duress
to
discover a word or phrase here and there which seems to bear more than one
sense in a single instance in a single context. But I need to be driven to
this
conclusion by other indicators in the text which make a single sense
reading
problematic. I think we are throwing all caution to the wind if we think
that
an author is carting around the entire semantic domain for a word every
time
he uses it in the text. James Barr covered all of this thirty some years
ago,
in The Semantics of Biblical Language. I can't reproduce his argument form
memory but it was forceful and convincing.

If on the other hand you are saying that John uses a single word in
different
contexts with different meanings then I would say this is a well documented
phenomena of language and no one will argue with you about it.

Clay Bartholomew
Three Tree Point