[Lexicog] Re: When Semantics Doesn't Matter

[bolstar1]

John: Good point. And, as much as Bill Clinton feels your pain as 
your president, I feel your pain as a rhetorician. The problem here 
lies in lexicographical principles of  1) commonality  2) pragmatics. 
e.g. -- According to Tom MacArthur (Oxford Companion to the English 
Language) "consonance" has fallen/is falling out of use amongst 
linguists -- vs. "assonance -- now a more encompassing term, 
or "alliteration" which also encompasses the two. Now this perplexes 
me a a rhetorician. Consonance -- what an exquisite, and self-
evident, category of rhetorical devices." Yet owing to usage 
(frequency), I bow to the pragmatists. Yet I could cite chapter-verse-
line as to how often the two, as well as  
alliterative/syllabic/combinations-thereof....mix and match. So, in 
order for your point to be well-taken, it must be well-received. The 
form-function categorization of terms/uses is rather a large hurdle. 
I have to take "inverse order of words" as an underlying lexeme in 
determining categories for this type of use. It seems to be less 
confusing. 
 -- I'm interested in hearing more of your observations -- 

Scott      

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, John Roberts 
<dr_john_roberts at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> 
> bolstar1 wrote:
> > John: I'm still chuckling over your example with Popeye. It seems 
> > that word order here is the order of the day, rather than 
function 
> > per se. 
> antistrophe:
> 
> Merriam Online:
> 1 a : the repetition of words in reversed order b : the repetition 
of
> a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses
> 
> chiasmus:
> 
> Encarta:
> inverted word order in phrase: a rhetorical construction in which 
the
> order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the 
reverse
> of the order in the first. An example is "gray was the morn, all
> things were gray."
> 
> If we take the above as standard definitions for antistrope and 
chiasmus 
> does it have to be inversion of the same words or just vaguely 
similar 
> words? If it has to be the same words, then I would say your 
original 
> example does not fulfill this requirement.
> 
> "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit."
> 
> For me (being a linguist and not a poet) "witty" is not the some 
word as 
> "wit" and "fool" is not the same word as "foolish". They don't have 
the 
> same form, nor the same function, nor even the same meaning.
> 
> John R
> 
> 
> -- 
> ********************
> John R Roberts
> SIL International Linguistics Consultant
> dr_john_roberts at ...
> ********************
>




 
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