The Semantics of Fire in the Targumim
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Aramaic has two words for fire: nūr and ʾiššā. Utilizing the targumim as a corpus and qualia roles for classification, this paper presents a clearer understanding of the lexical meaning for the two words. In the earliest targumim, ʾiššā is a natural kind governed by a sacred agent. The word nūr, however, is an artifactual kind with a profane agent and an explicit purpose. Since the two words share the same Formal Role (same physical substance), there is a degree of overlap which led at first to their interchangeability and later to the predominance of nūr.
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5
James Pustejovsky, The Generative Lexicon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 86.
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6
See Pustejovsky, The Generative Lexicon, pp. 85–88; James Pustejovsky, ‘The Generative Lexicon’, Computational Linguistics 17 (1991), pp. 409–441 (426–427).
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7
Philip Edmonds and Graeme Hirst, ‘Near-Synonymy and Lexical Choice’, Computational Linguistics 28 (2002), pp. 105–144 (107).
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13
See Don Nilsen, The Instrumental Case in English: Syntactic and Semantic Considerations (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), especially pp. 112–114; more recently see I.M. Schlesinger, ‘Instruments as Agents: On the Nature of Semantic Relations’, Journal of Linguistics 25 (1989), pp. 189–210.
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The Semantics of Fire in the Targumim
In: Aramaic StudiesSearch for other papers by Andrew W. Litke in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Aramaic has two words for fire: nūr and ʾiššā. Utilizing the targumim as a corpus and qualia roles for classification, this paper presents a clearer understanding of the lexical meaning for the two words. In the earliest targumim, ʾiššā is a natural kind governed by a sacred agent. The word nūr, however, is an artifactual kind with a profane agent and an explicit purpose. Since the two words share the same Formal Role (same physical substance), there is a degree of overlap which led at first to their interchangeability and later to the predominance of nūr.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 808 | 174 | 11 |
| Full Text Views | 41 | 4 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 56 | 7 | 0 |
