From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 18 1998 - 08:37:47 EST
At 6:32 AM -0600 3/18/98, Peter Phillips wrote:
>But...before this thread is closed down can I have my twopennath?
>
>Indeed semantic domains do not have hard edges - your examples show the
>possibility of a (reading) community developing its own sociolinguistic
>semantic domain. However, you cannot go on and say that the locus for
>meaning is not in the words. The locus of meaning, as cognitive
>linguistics seems to show IS precisely in the words as ciphers for the
>semantic domain - almost similar to Plato and his Ideas. Without the
>words there would be no semantic domain. The word anchors the meaning of
>the semantic domain and eventually even the most erudite teenage rebel
>will find it hard to wrench a word too far from that domain. If that is
>not the case then the only possibility for communication is a basic
>assumption that we are members of the same community. This assumption has
>to be taken at so basic a level that it would seem to point to a
>correlation between word and meaning rather than to convention about
>certain ciphers referring to certain things whereas in another community
>it could refer to something else entirely.
>
>Probably that made no sense at all - if so, just delete it and be done!
There is a great paradox here, one neatly posed in some aphorisms of
Heraclitus (DK 22B2): DIO DEI hEPESQAI TWi XUNWi, TOUT'ESTI TWi KOINWi;
XUNOS GAR hO KOINOS. TOU LOGOU D' EONTOS XUNOU, ZWOUSIN hOI POLLOI hWS
IDIAN ECONTES FRONHSIN. Which, rather freely turned, is: "So we have to go
along with the communal, i.e., with what we share with each other; for what
we share with each other is communal. And although the LOGOS is communal,
most people live as if they had a distinctly private understanding." Or DK
22B34: AXUNETOI AKOUSANTES KWFOISIN EOIKASI; FATIS AUTOISIN MARTUREI
PAREONTAS APEINAI "Since they don't understand what they hear, they are
like deaf people; the proverb describes them well when its says that even
when they're present, they're absent."
The story in Genesis 3 is marvelous: all the creatures of the world were
brought in front of Adam and he gave them all names. We conquer the world
by categorizing it with our names and imagine that we all will use the same
names for the same things. But then there's the story in Genesis 11: people
on earth came to have just too much community and appeared to be on the
verge of mastery of everything through mastery of language; the story tells
us God had a different idea, and at any rate, we know have a plethora of
languages and words and even on B-Greek, when it comes to talking about
aspect, we have one heck of a time trying to understand what each other is
saying. Stimmt's? oder habe ich recht?
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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