Aspects of Polysemy in Biblical Greek: The semantic Micro-Structure of Κρίσις

The paper deals with the data concerning the semantic micro-structure of the equivalent κρίσις within the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, in particular within a textual corpus constitued by the books of Pentateuch and Isaiah. These data must be regarded as the fisrt results of a research project concerning a broader portion of the Septuagintical lexicon, that is the nouns which are associated with the notion of ‘law’. The aims of such analysis are: on one hand, to provide a description of word meaning consistent with a lexicological framework which takes into account both the flexibility that the noun shows in context (in a range from vagueness to polysemy) and the syntagmatic processes of semantic composition (such as sense selection, sense modulation and sense coercion); on the other hand to show how the same degree of context-dependence applies to more extended paradigmatic meaning structures such as word-field. Through the data collected it will be also possible to investigate whether different semantic Hebrew equivalents match with the pattern of polysemy shown by the noun in Greek. In the paper the cluster of sense-nodules associated to the word κρίσις (i.e. the relatively autonomous units of sense capable of playing an independent role in the semantic processes) will be discussed.