The book you need for essay writing

What you need for your essays is the 1623 dictionary of learned equivalents so that a gentleman may write in his own words and then convert his ordinary words into an erudite discourse.

Homo Significans

“Homo sapiens is essentially, homo loquens, a speaking being, ‘speaking’ not in the sense (p1) in which parrots speak but in the sense of using sounds to convey meaning. This means that homo sapiens is really homo significans, a being who lives on expression and communication of meaning.” (p2)

Wierzbicka, Anna, English Speech Act Verbs: A semantic dictionary (Marrickville, Academic Press Australia, 1987)

This essay will argue that...

I nearly always put my academic work in the passive voice, which can be tiresome. As Wittgenstein said:

“At some point you have to speak in the first person…”

(Wittgenstien, quoted in Rhees 1984:206)

Shots in the dark

“Shots in the dark are likely to miss the target altogether. If one is lucky, one may sometimes hit somewhere nearby. If one is less lucky, even a long series of shots may fail to graze the target. If one is trying to economize on ammunition, it is good to be able to see at least the entire outline of the object one is aiming at.” (p28)

Wierzbicka, Anna, English Speech Act Verbs: A semantic dictionary (Marrickville, Academic Press Australia, 1987)

"Bold Italics Underlined"

I read a book today which seems to use when it means, though it also uses “for” ‘or’ . Confusing.

Harmless Drudgery

I really enjoyed my day spent with Wierzbicka, Anna, English Speech Act Verbs: A semantic dictionary (Marrickville, Academic Press Australia, 1987).

An Australian writing about English. Mmmm.

The work is a Dictionary of Speech Act Verbs with 37 groups of English speech act verbs. It aims to be both a theoretical and practical work: a reference dictionary for the general public, learners and teachers of English and seeks to advance and justify the semantic theory on which it is based .

Here are some highlights and jottings arising:

Linguists tend to see themselves as the elite with lexographers as the unassuming and unflamboyant contributors to scholarship, Johnson’s “harmless drudge”s. (p2)

The 21^st C may become the era of the dictionary. “From being an assiduous study of the grammatical skeleton of language and of its sounds linguistic analysis may at last become a holistic study of the entire organism, including, if one may say so, its lexical flesh.” (p2)

All of Life is Speech Acts

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that public life can be conceived as a gigantic network of speech acts. History itself seems to consist largely in acts of speech (threats, condemnations, offers, demands, negotiations, agreements, and so on).” (p3)

“… people’s private lives, too, consist to a phenomenal extent of speech acts.” (p3)

Circularity of all traditional dictionaries (p5) In the Longmans Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978) a deliberate attempt is made to minimise this circularity, with every of the 40 000 to 50 000 words in the dictionary defined in terms of only about 2000 words, including 60 speech act verbs, (p5) whereas English has about 300 speech act verbs (p6). The meaning of different words is more alluded to than spelt out.

Many Speech Act Books

“Since the publication of J. L. Austin’s How to do things with words (1962), speech acts have attracted an enormous amount of attention – from linguists, philosopshers, psycologists, anthropologists and sociologists. The bibliography of works devoted to this topic is enormous, and is growing each year.” (p7f)

Thinking in Words?

Searle (1979:ix): “Illocutionary acts are, so to speak, natural conceptual kinds, and we should no more suppose that our ordinary language verbs carve the conceptual field of illocutions at its semantic joints than we would suppose that our ordinary language expressions for naming and describing plants and animals correspond exactly to the natural biological kinds.” (p9) – [except if we think in words? Intentions / innate concepts / states of mind?]

Words come from cultural ideas as differences between languages show (p10)

Components of meaning / Definitions

“… instead of comparing an unidentified meaning with various other meanings, one could simply identify it, by enumerating all its constituents.” (p11) – decomposition – breaking down the word (p11) – reductive paraphrases to conceptual building blocks (p12)

“say” is regarded as irreducible here. No other speech act is contained in the definition of another.

The golden dream of lexographers, which they usually regard as unobtainable that, in Johnson’s words a definition should employ “terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained”. (quoted on p13 from LDOCE 1984:xi)

Charles Richardson dictionary by exemplification in quotations only not definitions (p19 citing Murray 1970:44)

Negative examples in dictionaries - show how words cannot be used (p20)

A definition is a linguistic hypothesis (p20) [falsification not proof]

Do you agree that the following definitions are not necessarily so?

Calculate can only be used when numbers are in mind; one cannot boast to oneself; neither rebuking nor reprimanding can be done gently; reprimanding is official to a subordinate rather than personal whereas reporving is purley didactic not punitive and can be done gently but not sharply (p21)

“… speech act verbs can differ from one another as to the ‘degree of performativity’ (Verschueren 1985)

Variations in degree of force (p22)

Dictionaries are for meanings of words. Encyclopedia are for information.

“The whole vocabulary of speech act verbs constitutes a network of interrelated networks, and there is no way it can be neatly divided into non-arbitary classes.” (p28)

“… the vocabulary of speech act verbs dosen’t have a hierarchical structure and cannot be represented as a set of ‘basic words’… and their ‘hyponyms’ (subkinds)…. The detailed analysis of more than 250 speech act verbs shows that there isn’t a single pair of verbs among them which would be related in the way flower and rose, oak and tree, or parrot and bird are related…. speech act verbs … don’t have the kind of “taxonomic” structure characteristic of words for animals and plants. The semantic relations between them are always more complicated than that.” (p29)

“The main value and the main interest of a work like the present one must consist in its portrayal of the semantic links between related words.” (p29)

Semi-arbitary classes and orderings (p29)

“… verbs such as chide, chastise and upbraid have been left out.” (p31)

“Still, the main goal of preparing a ‘real dictionary’ rather than a sample has been achieved: despite the exclusion of the more marginal members of the field, one can still say, I think, that the field of English speech act verbs has been, essentially, covered.” (p31)

“Ultimately, this metalanguage is based on a minimal set of fifteen ‘semantic primitives’, i.e. elementary conceptual building blocks, which are not defined themselves, and in terms of which all other words (and constructions) are defined. This set includes the following elements: I, you, someone, something, this, want, not want, think (of), say, imagine, know, place, part, world, and become (cf. Wierzbicka 1972, 1980a and b, and 1985a).” (p31)

See Appendix for all undefined wds used in dictionary- Metalexacon of 50 or 60 words

Re-use of words shows they have good value (p32)

Consistency of use facilitates comparison

Balance of readability and semantic adequacy of explanations (p32)

Eschatology & Speech Acts

Schreiter, Robert John, Eschatology as a Grammar of Transformation: A Study in Speech Act and Structural Semantics and Their Application to Some Problems in Eschatology (1974) looks very interesting - though its that horrible type written kind of book.

Schreiter has degrees in philosophy and psycology and a doctorate in theology. He's a Roman Catholic, anti-Liberal, pro-Patristic and medieval.

There's stuff about Speech Acts, Austin, Promising, Austin in Theological Literature, Searle, Time, Socially construed reality, Semiotics of the Symbolic Universe.

The book closes (p279f) with some Theses, of which these were my favs:

“1. Theology is more in need of a remythologization process than any crude sort of demythologization.”

“3. The further use of structural semantics [and reader response?] in exegesis could lead to an important re-appropriation of patristic and medieval exegesis for contemporary theology.”

“4. Current theology has more need of investigations into the language of concrete theological texts than a further proliferation of theories about what religious language might possibly be.”

“6. How the presence vs absence problem is approached and articulated plays a central, if not the central, role in the generation of eschatological theology.”

“11. Current discussions of a critical theology, i.e. those trying to relate theology’s role to the other faculties of the university, should take caution lest their real guiding research interest become getting their share of the university budget.”

“15. Despite all the difficulties of applying philosophy of language to the problems of theology, one of Austin’s sayings makes for immediate application to those of us who try to bring the two areas together: “On these matters, dogmatists require prodding: although history indeed suggests that it may sometimes be better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.”

British Library Research Jolly

I feel weary but terribly scholarly just now as I jollied off to the BL to study for the first time today [well, yesterday, now]. And quite amazing it is to. “The World’s Knowledge” is not far wrong.

One can make it door to door from Oak Hill in 45mins if you walk briskly, change to the Victoria line and Ken Livingstone’s tube smiles on you.

It is totally free and the criterion for use is (I think) just that you couldn’t reasonably get the books you want from another library. (I simplify!).

Well, it was quite different from the Bodleian. Most of the books are on-site and don’t have to be brought in from the country by a man in a van on a Thursday afternoon only but its mainly big pretty books and referencey type stuff on open shelves, as far as I could see.

The staff were horrified at my suggestion that I might just leave my books on the desk overnight and come back tomorrow. They write down your desk number (I was 2216) so that they know where all their books are at any one time. People patrol like a weird cross between flight attendants, exam invigilators and security guards. I was tempted to order drinks, but I thought better of it.

The readers are like hundreds of silent intellectual battery hens on 3 huge levels.

If it were smaller, the reading room could not be nicer. Big wooden desks – though not as big as DP’s, of course. And spacious leather covered padded chairs. My bottom bore up.

They also had the books ready. I ordered them on-line yesterday and most of them say they’ll be delivered in 70 mins. Overnight they’d got a book from Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, for me. I had to queue for a while to collect them and take them back.

Its BL clear carrier bags only and no pens in the reading rooms. I had my own overhead light and there seemed to be the interweb. I hadn’t brought the lead and I don’t know if one has to sign up in some special geeky way. There might be wireless access too. I think there may even be a button at my desk to call an attendant, but I didn’t dare press it!

Unfortunately one is not allowed to take bottled water into the library. Free drinking water is provided outside from a machine I could hardly work. The café is good. In the cafeteria style restaurant I had a main meal, a pudding and a drink for under a tenner and it was all yummy. Interesting literary items, books and gifts in the shop. I got a poster of an old map of Mrs Lloyd’s place of birth for a fiver.

They do jip you for photocopying, though. Single pages only at a time and 20p a shot!

One can have a look at Codex Whatsit in one of the permanent free exhibitions (Treasures of the British Library) while u r there.

There are newspapers and sound archives too.

All in all its outstanding and I’m a very satisfied customer – I mean, reader. Though of course Oak Hill library is better, Wendy.

Law, Faith, Works, Obedience & Justification: a proposal (version 2)

The other day in the Oak Hill post graduate seminar we were discussing things like faith, works, obedience, merit, legalism, the sacrificial system, the Mosaic and renewed covenants and how people are justified.

Chris Thompson gave some thoughts mainly from Dt 29ff about whether or not the Mosaic covenant is presented as keepable.

I plan to post here some "theses", numbered for convenience more than logical order, to sum up the whole thing as a work in progress.

I'll try to be both precise and impressionistic (not reductionistic). I'll try to keep in mind both biblical language and traditional systematic categories.

Comments, questions, challenges etc most welcome.

Folk at Oak Hill are due to discuss it all in another couple of weeks.

1. No one has ever been or will every be justified by what they do on the basis of merit (with the possible exception of the Lord Jesus Christ, though even in his case we may distinguish).

2. Justification is only ever in union with Christ alone, in the Spirit, through faith alone.

3. The Old Testament law could be kept in the sense that one could be a faithful covenant keeping member of the people of God and blameless.


4. The Old Testament law could never be kept by human sinners in the sense that once could attain sinless perfection and merit salvation.

5. The Old Testament law always had 3 purposes:
(a) Mirror - to reveal sin
(b) Telescope - to point to salvation by the sacrifice of Christ
(c) Light - to show God's people how to live
and continues to fulfill each of those functions today.

6. Present justification is God's verdict of the future announced in the present on the basis of trust in Christ; futre justification will be according to works as a genuine (evidential) non-meritorious ground on the basis of a whole life fundamentally lived on God's side.

7. The Old Testament law is not abolished or abrogated but fulfilled, transformed and renewed.

8. The (propitiatory) sacrificial and Aaronic priesthood ends with Christ in the sense that it is not to be set up again today in the Jerualem temple.

9. The Mosaic administration is ended and the Covenant is now in its (re)newed administration.


10. All God's laws have lasting force but must be applied according to local circumstances and in a manner appropriate to the stage of salvation history.

Oak Hills Christian College

Also not to be confused:

Oak Hills Christian College and Oak Hill Theological College.

Its all Sacramental in a sense

Based on: Bromiley, G. W., Sacramental Teaching and Practice in the Reformation Churches (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1957)

"Sacrament" is a Latin term for an oath engaging a soldier to obedience, which “merely describes an aspect of what is involved in these means of grace.” (p11)

A sacrament is “a divine act that carries with it a specific meaning or grace.” (p11)

There was “a period of confusion, when the word sacrament had been applied generally to all kinds of signs or actions with a certain spiritual significance” before the Western church defined 7 (p12).

“… it has always been admitted that we may give the word [sacrament] a more extended meaning in which it may cover all the material things which speak to us of God and His actions, so that ultimately the universe itself can be regarded as sacramental by the Christian.” (p12).

These 2 sacraments, baptism and supper: instituted and commanded by Christ “stand in close relation to the saving work of Jesus Christ in a way which cannot be said of any other observances that may be termed sacramental in a loose and extended sense.” (p13)

We Have An Altar

A Dictionary of Bible Symbols (Owen, Grist & Dowling, Grace Publications, Lodon 1992) (which looks worth a look, especially by those who are not totally committed to under-interpretive minimalism) suggests that the different types of altar in the Bible may be seen as types of aspects of the death of Christ:

The Altar of earth - the humble humanity of Christ (Ex 20:24)

The Altar of stone - unhewn stone for the soveriegn and unique work of God in human salvation with no mixture of human works (Ex 20:25)

The Altar of bronze - the unyielding demands of the justice and judgement of God and the death of Christ as our whole burnt offering (Ex 27:1-2)

The Altar of gold - the precious death of Christ (Ex 30:1-10) - incense for the pleasing-to-God sweet smelling fragrance of life of the death of Christ.

The dictionary also points to the Venerable Bede's On Tropes and Figures found in Holy Scripture, as the first English example of such a book, which sounds interesting.

What do you call yours?

What’s in a name? And what do you call it?

Perhaps the most usual Reformed title for what we are about to do is “The Lord’s Supper”.

It is “the Lord’s”. Jesus established it. He owns and governs it. The King of Kings is the host. The Bread of Life is the food. The Friend of Sinners invites us and feeds us. We are fed with the Great Shepherd of the Sheep.

It is a “supper”, a meal. We are welcomed and fed and nourished here. We eat as friends, as family. We are literally “companions” of the Lord as he shares bread with us.

The meal is also commonly called “Holy Communion”.

It is “holy”: special, set apart, sanctified. We have bread and wine, not burger and chips. This is no ordinary supper. It is for God’s special people and sets us apart.

It is communion: we share it together and participate in fellowship in Christ with one another.

And it is “Eucharist”. We eat it with thanksgiving and joy. The whole mark of our attitude is gratitude for a gift received.

Finally, the Lord’s Supper has often been called “The Mass”. People who call it that have sometimes got the meaning of the Supper disastrously wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with the title, “The Mass” in itself. In fact, it could remind us of something very important about the Supper.

The term, “The Mass” comes from the Latin word “missa”, meaning dismissal, which was used in the concluding formula of the service: “Ite, missa est” (“Go, the dismissal is made").

The words remind us that God sends us out from this meal to serve his purposes in the world. The Supper is our nourishment to build us up for the mission on which God sends us in this coming week.

Leavened or Unleavened Supper?

The Reformed Churches have from time to time debated whether we ought to use leavened or unleavened bread in the Lord’s Supper. Most people are agreed that it doesn’t matter too much, but its worth taking a moment to think about what the symbolic or cultural significance of each might be.

It is almost certain that Jesus used unleavened bread in the Last Supper, in accordance with Exodus 12, because it was a Passover meal. And the Lord’s Supper is clearly our Christian Passover. Jesus is the Lamb of God. We are saved from sin and death and hell by his bloody cross. The angel of the wrath of God will Passover all those for whom the sacrificed Son of God was slain.

The unleavened bread speaks of an urgent fleeing from Egypt and hence the desperate need to get out of sin-country and death-zone. God’s people must be pure and free from the leaven of sin, bitterness, malice and hypocrisy.

Yet, leavened bread might be more appropriate for the Supper in this great Gospel Age of the Church, this side of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The land / world has been decisively cleansed by Jesus’ death. We are not running from the world in panic. Our enemies are decisively defeated. The yeast of the gospel is causing the loaf of the church to grow and grow and grow.

A Wendy Bell Poem Blog

You must read Wendy's Poems at www.wendyjbell.blogspot.com and say what you think (nicely!).

I thought Echos excellent. And I hope hopeful in a wierd angsty kind of way?

The Muslims are at it (kindda)

The revd Douglas Wilson rightly points out on his blog that its worth knowing that:

At least 40 millions Muslim youth in the Muslim world’s religious schools, called madrasas, are avidly memorizing the entire Koran plus a generally extremist body of related traditions—the hadiths" (Don Richardson, Secrets of the Koran, p. 69).

So, we need a startergy for the take-over of the world by the Lord Jesus through the gospel in the power of the Spirit by the Word.

How many Muslim and Christian "youth" are there? What are the birth rates?

I wonder how many children are getting a thoroughly Christian education either at home or in Christian schools?

How many children have a knowledge of the Bible (including the meaning of the words) to rival the Muslim memorization of the dead and death-giving words of the Koran?

Horray for Mrs Lloyd

There has been some dancing in the Lloyd flat-ette this morning as we just discovered (as I always expected) that my brainy and brilliantly tallented wife got firsts for both her modules from last semester (performance / piano recital etc. and 19th C music).

Bottles of champagne and flowers (bunches rather than bottles preffered) may be delivered c/o Oak Hill College and will be gratefully recieved.

Mrs Lloyd can be hired for musical purposes from £20 per hour. Terms and conditions apply.

Communion Meals on Wheels

Please read my comments In Praise of Jensen.

The Dean, who is seeking to reform St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, commented that they have put wheels (very discreetly) on the Communion table and every Tom, Dick and Harry is up in arms about it.

He said the table is very heavy and the wheels, which can't normally be seen, are a kindness to the Cathedral staff.

For myself, however, I would much rather not have wheels on the Lord's Table. And I wouldn't have it shifted around.

The Lord's Table should be the biggest, best, gradest, finest, most lavishly spread, welcoming table of all. There should be inexhaustable food for all the nations, for all the people of the king to eat with him, for many companions. There should always be a table spread with gifts of broken bread and poured out wine at the heart of the meeting of the family of God, just as there are daily communal meals in a family and just as the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ is ever at the centre of his people's gathering.

The immovable table of the Lord is a great cultural fixed point: an outpost of heaven, a present taste of cross and eschaton. It should be the most stable thing in the world, not wheeled off to one side for convenience's sake.

When I grow up, I hope to have a dinning room and a nice big dinning table. I could use it to feed the cats and dogs, rest my feet and play ping pong. I could set it up in my bathroom or put it in the garage when I want to use the dinning room to for some bicycle maintainance, but I'd rather not. How much more, then, would I rather not move around the Lord's table. I reckon he might not like it as he established a table at the heart of his house and commanded that we do this in memorialisation of him.

Evangelicals might get a sense of what its like to have the Lord's Table on wheels by thinking about what they would make of the symbolic significance of putting the pulpit on wheels and shifting it when there wasn't preaching. Or using a Bible as fire kindling.

Which brings us back to the old point of the Reformers that spoken and edible Word go together and are of the essence of the Lord's Day service of covenant renewal.

"Yes, and..." or "No, but..."

"Yes, and..." can be more rhetorically persuasive than "No, but...". Sometimes it can be gramatically acceptable and logically true too.

Sabbath Rugby

Today, DV, Wales will soundly thrash Ireland. In the rugby, of course.

Now, is that lawful recreation proper to the Sabbath day of rest or is it failure to devote the day to the Lord as special worship?

Would you have obeyed James I's command to publish The Book of Sports if you were a gospel minister in 17th C England? As far as I know, Rugby was not mentioned. The declaration apparently listed archery, dancing, "leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation" as permissible sports, together with "May-games, Whitsun-ales and Morris-dances, and the setting up of May-poles". Amongst the activities that were prohibited were bear- and bull-baiting, "interludes" and bowling.