From: Rod Decker (rdecker@bbc.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 17 1998 - 13:39:56 EST
>The aspect theory people throw around the terms semantic and pragmatic in a
>manner that leaves my head spinning. I am hopelessly out of date since my
>study of semantics predated the flowering of the aspect theory debate.
>
>Could one of you who have studied this help me understand how these two terms
>are currently being used. Please keep in mind I don't know all the current
>linguistics terminology so the definitions have to be in plain language.
Fair request. I can do no better in reply to cite one of our distinguished
collegues from a b-greek post last summer. (I cited Mari in the
dissertation as the best concise statement of this difference, so I'll
simply paste it in here.)
>M. Olsen provides one of the best, concise distinctions between semantics
>and pragmatics: "Semantics is the 'uncancelable' meaning of a word/
>sentence/grammtical form, the meaning it must have, in each context of
>use.... Pragmatics ... refers to the aspects of meaning that are cancelable
>(without contradiction) and reinforceable (without redundancy), credit
>Grice. These aspects of meaning depend on context interacting with the
>semantics" (B-Greek post, 5 August 97, s.v., "semantics vs. pragmatics"
><http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek/archives/97-08/0335.html>; she develops
>this distinction more fully in her dissertation: "Model," 21-29). See also
>B. Comrie, Tense, CTL, 23.
[The ref. to Mari's diss. is pp. 17-22 in the published book form (for
those of you who may have it).]
Rod
________________________________________________________________
Rodney J. Decker Baptist Bible Seminary
Asst. Prof./NT P O Box 800
rdecker@bbc.edu Clarks Summit PA 18411
http://www.bbc.edu/faculty/RDecker/
________________________________________________________________
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:39:16 EDT