From: Kimmo Huovila (kimmo@kaamas.kielikone.fi)
Date: Wed Dec 27 2000 - 01:24:20 EST
Rolf Furuli wrote:
> I agree with your words above, except the first clause. Discourse analysis
> is an important part of my studies, but it is useless for two important
> reasons, when the *definition* of the aspects is at stake:
By definition I meant definition of the meaning of aspect, which also
goes into the realm of discourse. Of course, if you draw a strict
distinction between semantics and pragmatics, this does not necessarily
apply.
>
> 1) When studying chunks of text above the clause-level,we have to account
> for many different factors at the same time. There is no way to know which
> factor is responsible for what, because all the factors can contribute to
> the meaning. The possible role of each factor (its contribution to meaning)
> increases exponentially with the number of factors in a unit of text.
Minimal pairs are an excellent object of study, as you indicated
earlier. But the meaning of many features is know well enough so that
they can be used, together with context, to determine the meaning of
some relatively unknown feature by studying where it occurs and where it
does not.
>
> 2) One's definition of aspect is decided before one starts with discourse
> analysis. There is no way for the reverse to occur.
Why not? There are many other discourse features. Any meaning we
attribute to the aspect must be compatible, at least in the vast
majority of cases of actual usage in corpora, with the use of other
known discourse features in the same context.
>
> In short, discourse analysis has no controls, as far as the meaning of the
> smallest parts of communication are concerned. In order to have a
> meaningful interplay of semantics and pragmatics, my concern is first to
> isolate those parts of communication whose meaning is uncancellable. On
> this basis is it much easier to find the pragmatic parts.
OK. It is surely worthwhile to attempt to find uncancellable meanings.
But is there any guarantee that there is always such? Would not the
prototype theory hold open the possibility of such a meaning for a
grammatical category that any semantic element of it may be unapplicable
in some instance? In other words, do you, on _a priori grounds_, exclude
for example Randall Buth's analysis of the Hebrew verb as expressing now
tense, now aspect, now mood, as impossible?
(I am not arguing that aspectual meaning does not have an uncancellable
element. My note is more methodological here.)
>
> BTW, can you define/explain your use of the term bounded?
By bounded I mean semantically perfective.
Kimmo Huovila
---
B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [jwrobie@mindspring.com]
To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-327Q@franklin.oit.unc.edu
To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:36:45 EDT