Misconstruing 'opportunity to be reintegrated into the community (the perpetrator) has injured by his or her offence' As A Lexical Item

Martin & Rose (2007: 84):

Tutu contrasts retributive justice with restorative justice, completing his case that justice is being done when amnesty is given. He explicitly states that restorative justice is part of African jurisprudence, so implying that retributive justice is non-African (i.e. Western). Table 3.3 gives the lexical strings in this stage.

 

Blogger Comments:

In addition to misrepresenting the relations of lexical cohesion as experiential semantics, Table 3.3 includes two types of misunderstanding:

1. what constitutes a lexical item, and
2. the nature of the relation between them.

The wordings that are falsely presented as lexical items (see previous post) are:

• an impersonal state
• retributive justice
• punishment with little consideration for victims and hardly any for the perpetrator
• traditional African jurisprudence
• restorative justice (2)
• the spirit of ubuntu
• healing of breaches
• redressing of imbalances
• restoration of broken relationships
• opportunity to be reintegrated into the community (the perpetrator) has injured by his or her offence
• a far more personal approach
• the offence
• something that has happened to people
• rupture in relationships

Because these are not lexical items, the lexical relations said to obtain between them are problematic, to say the least. The wordings that are claimed to be meronymic (x is a part of a) are:

• an impersonal state — retributive justice
• traditional African jurisprudence — restorative justice
• restorative justice — healing / forgiveness / reconciliation
• something that has happened to people — rupture in relationships

The wordings that are claimed to be hyponymic (x is a type of a) are:

• retributive justice — punishment with little consideration for victims and hardly any for the perpetrator
• restorative justice — the spirit of ubuntu
• the spirit of ubuntu — healing of breaches / redressing of imbalances / restoration of broken relationships / opportunity to be reintegrated into the community (the perpetrator) has injured by his or her offence
• opportunity to be reintegrated into the community (the perpetrator) has injured by his or her offence — a far more personal approach
• a far more personal approach — restorative justice
• the offence — something that has happened to people