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M. L. Strauss, "Literal Meaning" Fallacy
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Linguists draw an important distinction between sentences and utterances.
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A
sentence is a semantically complete unit of language.
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"He hit the ball" is a sentence.
An utterance is a sentence which appears in real life, spoken or written within a particular
context. Suppose one of my children is playing baseball outside and I say to my wife,
"He hit the ball." Later, watching a baseball game on television, I remark "He hit the
ball." While these two are the same sentence, they are two different utterances (with
different contexts and different referents). While sentences have potential meaning,
utterances have actual meaning (or we might say actualized meaning).
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Every sentence
in the Bible is an utterance, since it appears in a context and has actual, not just potential,
meaning.
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The meaning of an utterance is determined not by its linguistic components alone
(which are the same for both of the sentences above), but by the whole life setting in
which it is uttered. Linguists refer to the former ­ the linguistic components ­ as
semantics, the meaning of the words, phrases and clauses. The latter ­ the total life
setting ­ involves not only semantics, but other factors as well, including the pragmatics
of the speech act and the assumptions of sender and receiver. Pragmatics refers to all the
accompanying circumstances and contextual factors, including tone of voice, inflection,
gesture, proxemics (the use of personal space), and cultural considerations.
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Assumptions refer to all that the sender and receiver bring to the utterance, including
knowledge of the language system, worldview, cultural perspective, etc. These three ­
semantics, pragmatics and assumptions ­ work together to produce meaning. For
example, in American culture the gesture of winking may mean the speakers words are
to be taken facetiously, while in biblical culture it is usually an invitation to sin.
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Assumptions determine the meaning senders and receivers assign to both linguistic and
pragmatic entities.
We can now clarify the steps of translation. The translator, whose goal is to transfer
the meaning from the original author to the contemporary reader, has two daunting tasks.
(1) The first is to determine the intention of the utterance or speech-act through a detailed
examination of its co-text and context. The translator must seek, inasmuch as possible, to
identify the assumptions shared by both author and original readers and thereby infer the
intention of the author. This inference will never be exact because of the differences in
time and culture, and because all communication has a measure of imprecision. But
through a study of linguistic and cultural data, the translator can determine with a high
degree of certainty the authors intention and the relevance which the readers would have
26
See Peter Cotterell and Max Turner, Linguistics & Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity, 1989), 22-23., 63-64.
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This is a simplified definition, and there is significant debate concerning what constitutes a sentence.
The one constant seems to be the idea of completeness.
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By "real" we mean existing in a particular context. An imaginary character in a novel may produce an
utterance.
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Proverbs in a collection like the biblical book of Proverbs are more complex, since they are relatively
context-less and may be said to represent community wisdom rather than an authors discourse speech act.
Yet proverbs do have both intentionality and meaning, derived from the assumptions of the socio-linguistic
community in which they were produced.
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In written language, pragmatics are more limited than in oral communication, since no speaker is
present. Yet some features, such as bowing down or tone of voice may be explicitly narrated.
31
Cotterell and Turner, Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation, 14-15.