A word with both a phrase and syntactic level functionality - like καθώς - will have its name given to reflect the relationship that it makes between the phrase that follows it and the other phrases (units of text based on verbs) that occur in the same paragraph. Within a single phrase you can limit yourself to word-level analysis - where words relate to other words, but this is a word that relates phrases to each other.Alan Bunning wrote:Well, no at this time I am only interested in parsing at the word level and the 180 or so differences I want to resolve at that level were apparently not straightforward to someone. Robie and Tauber have gone beyond that and are doing syntax trees.Stephen Hughes wrote:Parsing is fairly straightforward - identify the parts of speech and their declensions and conjugations at a word level. Catergorising the syntactical elements and their functions at a phrase and paragraph level is a bit more involved. What you are asking about here is a combination of single phrase and paragraph functions of καθώς. At a word level, it is not declined or conjugated - it is technically indeclinable.Alan Bunning wrote:I am not sure that I can tell the difference. I don't trust my own parsings enough to think that someone else has an error. I usually think there might be another valid way to label it, or else that I might be wrong. That is why I was looking for help.
Let me try to think within the limitations of your analytical system. (Currencies where small denominations can buy large items have less flexibility in pricing than currencies when large denominations are needed for small things.) All models are simplifications. That is how we cope with information.
If the scope and requirements of your analytical methodology require you to stay at a word-level analysis, then I think that you would have to name it a conjunction. Its function at a word-level is that it joins what is before with what is after. It is not an adverb, if at a word-level, an adverb is a single word called "adverb", any more than a preposition is called an adverb when it designates a nominal phrase as adverbial - there are prepositions which are regularly part of the verbal phrases, and other that are used more freely, then καθώς is not an adverb.
Your καθώς designates that the phrase that follow it is adverbial, but it itself is not adverbial (an adverb), it is an "adverbialiser" if you like. It is one of the ways (the others I listed above were only from memory, so don't treat that list as exhaustive) that Greek makes a verb or verbal phrase adverbial. Without out the verbal phrase that follows it, it does not have the ability to exist as an adverb in the way that say οὕτως "thus" does.
Why? Because the preposition κατά (καθ' before vowels with the spiritus asper) doesn't have sense without a noun or nominal phrase following it, while οὕτως derives from the demonstrative pronoun οὗτος which refers to something outside itself which is not necessarily in close proximity to it (within the word order) but is there never-the-less in the text. In the same way that a preposition needs the nominal phrase that follows it, so this καθώς needs the verbal phrase that follow it.
Looking at only the word itself, and giving it a name, it would be "conjunction", saying to the reader / listener "I am making a break now between the preceding and following parts of the text. The type of conjunction it is, is as Barry has pointed out - "adverbial conjunction". I am saying that "adverbial" in this case means turning a phrase based on a verb into an adverb. At a phrase or pharagraph-level of analysis, when the word καθώς is taken together with the verbal phrase that follow it, it is an adverbial conjunction. If a preposition were taken with the phrase after it, it could be designated as an adverbial prepositional phrase.
Is what I've written too dense (or am I the writer too dense)?