MAubrey wrote:Stephen Carlson wrote:Yes, more examples would be great.
This is me eating some humble pie after Steve Runge pointed out to me that fronted =/= argument focus, inherently, that determining sentence articulation of the proposition needs to take precedence. The nature of the articulation needs to be determine on the basis of what is presupposed already and what is asserted.
The point that fronted element != argument focus seems very helpful. I had basically assumed that predicate focus was diagnosed by the lack of a preverbal focus element, so non-topics found before the verb were indicative of argument focus. (This is basically the claim of Matic 2003's "broad" and "narrow" focus respectively.) Though this heuristic mostly works, it does not always work, and I think Matt 21:33 may be an exception. The context calls for predicate focus but the verb is final in its clause. Nevertheless, the exceptions to this heuristic seem to be quite infrequent and I don't quite have a handle on them (yet). I wonder if Steve's talk of a "dominant focal element of the larger focus structure", my stray thought of (pseudo) noun incorporation, and Stephen's notion of "stand-alone" may all be grasping at a similar goal: perhaps in certain predicates the verb is too (semantically?) light to come first.
I'm not sure what to make of your suggestion of anchoring procedurals, however; I'd need to read up about the concept. (As for Barry's "move along: there's nothing to see here" approach, well, there can't be progress if you give up too soon.)
MAubrey wrote:There's plenty of data in chapter three of Levinsohn's Discourse Features, the title of which is "Constituent Order in the Comment"--that is to say, everything Levinsohn says about marked word orders in section 3.6 "Preverbal Focus" of chapter three (and the sections that continue through the end of the chapter) is predicated on the assumption that he is still talking about Topic-Comment constructions.
My copy of Levinsohn is at the office, so I'll have to consult it later. My recollection, however, was not that topic-comment constructions continued through the end of the chapter. Nevertheless, the examples may still be worth consulting. I did come across 1 Pet 1:21 τοὺς δι’ αὐτοῦ πιστοὺς εἰς θεὸν τὸν ἐγείραντα αὐτὸν ἐκ νεκρῶν
καὶ δόξαν αὐτῷ δόντα, ὥστε τὴν πίστιν ὑμῶν καὶ ἐλπίδα εἶναι εἰς θεόν, where the context also suggests a predicate focus (cf. ἐγείραντα αὐτὸν ἐκ νεκρῶν) but with the verb in final position.
MAubrey wrote:Stephen Carlson wrote:As for the relative clause, I read the relative clause as continuing through the end of the verse, so I don't quite get the "anchor" talk. Is the argument that the verse is mispunctuated and we should have a full stop after ἀμπελῶνα? If so, the καί bothers me.
Anchor isn't a technical term here. The relative clause may very well continue through. I don't really have a stake in that. It's a separate issue from the information structure.I'm just saying that the steps building of the vineyard is initiated by the clause with the καἰ rather than with the relative clause. The first clause in those steps is inherently more salient as the first step and gets a marked DFE in the comment.
My point about the extent of the relative clause is that I read the step of fencing the vineyard as the second step, after planting the vineyard.
MAubrey wrote:Stephen Carlson wrote:The Markan introduction of ἀμπελῶνα ἄνθρωπον ἐφύτεθσεν is its own level of interestingness. Thanks for pointing that out. Where can I read more about anchoring procedures?
Well, that was a guess off the top of my head. You'd have to go find some and see how they're structured. Procedures are a genre that doesn't get talked about in a lot of grammars. I can say that the thought came to me because when I first took Field Methods and Second Language & Culture Acquisition (and also later when I TA'd them), one of the expected exercises for minority language analysis was to determine how that particular language organized and structured procedurals. That involved eliciting the steps of, say, making a salad in the language: how the event was initiated, how the individual steps were introduced, etc. Languages do these things different. I could see if I could find my old notes and see what literature was referred to on the subject, but off hand, I can't think of anything in particular...sorry.
Well, if something comes to mind, please share!
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia