Biblical Words and Their Meaning: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics by Silva Moisés

Author:Silva, Moisés [Silva, Moisés]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

the rule of maximal redundancy, “The best meaning is the least meaning,” as the explicator’s and defining lexicographer’s rule of thumb for deciding what a hapax legomenon most probably means: he defines it in such fashion as to make it contribute least to the total message derivable from the passsage where it is at home, rather than, e.g., defining it according to some presumed etymology or semantic history.41

At first blush, this statement may appear strange or even unacceptable, for we tend “to assume that an odd word must have some odd sense, the odder the better.”42 However, a moment’s reflection on the redundancy of natural language will persuade us that “Joos’s Law” is eminently reasonable.

Research into communication engineering has had considerable impact on our understanding of language.43 In particular, we have become aware of the need for redundancy in communication. When any piece of information is transmitted, considerable interference and distortion (noise) cannot be avoided; if the means of communication is one hundred percent efficient, the slightest interference will obliterate the information. In the course of a normal conversation, the hearer’s reception is greatly distorted by a variety of causes: grammatical lapses on the part of the speaker, less than perfect enunciation, physical noises in the surroundings, momentary daydreaming on the part of the hearer. In the vast majority of cases, the hearers do receive the information because of the built-in redundancy of the language. Suppose, for example, that we hear a three-syllable word, but only understand the last two syllables -terday; not only are we able to guess that the word is yesterday, but we make the guess without any awareness that we failed to hear the first syllable. Similarly, missing a complete word seldom bothers us because the sentence as a whole normally discloses that word. Even if we fail to hear a complete sentence when listening to a speech, we are unlikely to miss anything that is not automatically deducible from the rest of the speech.

Joos illustrates his point by referring to Webster’s Third’s definition of per contra, which includes the supportive quotation, “the female is generally drab, the male, per contra, brilliant.” Assuming the user of the dictionary has an adequate grasp of

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