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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
Certainly since the groundbreaking work of Ferdinand de Saus-sure, the social character of language has been axiomatic for most linguists. Saussure writes: ‘The structure of a language is a social product of our language faculty. At the same time, it is also a body of necessary conventions adopted by society to enable members of society to use their language faculty.’ Eugene Nida and Johannes Louw, writing in the supplement to their New Testament lexicon, acknowledge the connection between their treatment of semantics and sociology, but they refrain from specifying what they think the relationship between language and society to be. Nida is somewhat more forthcoming in his study of componential analysis when he writes:
There are analogies between the structure of a culture and the semantic structure of a corresponding language, but there is no set of one-to-one correspondences. A language must be free to describe a variety of possibilities, including those which have not as yet entered the culture. Nevertheless, the language does reflect in certain aspects of its semantic structure those aspects of the culture which for one reason or another have become salient in the lexical contrasts.
1 de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics (ed. Charles, Bally and Albert, Sechehaye; trans. Baskin, Wade; New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill, 1966) 9–10.Google Scholar
2 Nida, Eugene A. and Louw, Johannes P., Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testament: A Supplement to the Greek-English Lexicon Based on Semantic Domains (SBLRBS 25; Atlanta: Scholars, 1992) viii.Google Scholar
3 Nida, Eugene A., Componential Analysis of Meaning: An Introduction to Semantic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1975) 36.Google Scholar
4 Williams, Glyn, Sociolinguistics (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 39–40 and 230–31.Google Scholar
5 See also σύνδουλος under this domain.
6 Έλεύθερος is also included by the editors in the domain ‘Control, Rule’ and the sub-domain ‘Release, Set Free’ and is described as ‘pertaining to being free – “free, to be free”’.
7 In his translation of Romans 6.16, Dunn, James D. G. conveys this sense of control: ‘Do you not know that when you give control of yourselves as someone's slaves to obey him…’: Romans 1–8 (WBC 38a; Dallas: Word, 1988) 334.Google Scholar
8 Louw and Nida also claim that ‘if the context does not suggest two or more meanings of a word, one should assume that in any one context a lexeme has a single meaning’, Lexical Semantics, 11.
9 Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 1.773.
10 See the comments regarding first-century slavery and this text by Dunn, Romans, 341.
11 See above, pp. 77–8.
12 For that matter, έλεύθερος and έλευθεροûν do not appear in the epistle to the Romans until chapter 6 and έλευθερία does not appear until chapter 8.
13 In the purity system of Judaism, there is a close relationship between impurity and the violation of Torah. See the discussion of Paul and Jewish purity by Neyrey, Jerome H., Paul in Other Words: A Cultural Reading of His Letters (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1990) 21–55.Google Scholar
14 Nida, , Componential Analysis, 200.Google Scholar
15 For a discussion of the diatribe style in Paul's letter to the Romans, see Stowers, Stanley Kent, The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans (SBLDS 57; Chico: Scholars, 1981).Google Scholar
16 Nida, , Componential Analysis, 65.Google Scholar
17 With the exception of ‘God’, each of the terms identified as a controlling agent is designated semantically as either an activity or a characteristic.
18 MacMullen, Ramsay, Roman Social Relations: 50 BC to AD 284 (New Haven/London: Yale University, 1974) 105.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., 94.
20 Bradley, K. R., Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (New York/Oxford: Oxford University, 1987) 81–3.Google Scholar
21 Nida writes with regard to problems of translation: ‘Words are fundamentally symbols for features of the culture. Accordingly, the cultural situation in both languages must be known in translating…’, Exploring Semantic Structures (ILGL 11; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1975) 68.Google Scholar
