"Grammatical" Categories
Kevin Smith
kgs at iafrica.com
Sun Sep 19 04:25:51 EDT 1999
Dear friends,
I have followed Carl Conrad's (in particular, though not only) comments about so-called grammatical categories and categorising with keen interest. Although I feel out of my depth commenting on the matter, I want to make one or two observations from a student's perspective.
Firstly, Carl's caution against the artificiality of the complex descriptive-classificatory systems employed by some grammars is well received and is quite clearly correct. For example, one could easily apply a similar method to English and come up with, for instance, 20-30 categories describing how "of" is used (as is done with the genitive case). However, such categories would be very artificial since no English speaker consciously uses such categories. Instead his meaning is intuitively grasped by his audience.
Secondly, in spite of the artificial nature of the categories in question, an awareness of the various *functions* that, say, a genitive noun or a participle can convey is very helpful to those of us who don't have an instinctive feel for Greek as we do for our own language. Awareness of what a given construction could mean helps one to make sense of it. If understood functionally, various categories can serve as valuable clues to guide one's thinking. As long as they are understood functionally, as guides to meaning, they can be helpful.
Thirdly, the danger underlying the descriptive-classificatory approach is that Greek students (like myself) tend to get the impression that the categories are an inherent part of the Greek language rather than a functional description of how the language is used in different contexts. When I first read Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, I literally thought Greek had 43 different kinds of genitive and 7 different kinds of perfect tense (I don't know if it was Wallace's intent to create that impression; that's just how I interpreted him). Greek seemed to be a completely different and much richer language than English. The result of my erroneous understanding of the nature of Greek was that finding the correct label for a given construction became the goal of my study of the GNT. How foolish!
Thanks Carl for your thought provoking comments that have opened my eyes to the artificial nature of descriptive categories. I shall continue to be a big fan of Wallace's grammar, but will use it more wisely knowing (English "causal participle", right?!) that his categories are not part of the language itself.
Kevin Smith
Doctoral student
University of Stellenbosch
South Africa
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