Participle/Finite Verb constituent order (again!)
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Jul 19 20:39:29 EDT 2000
At 4:59 PM -0700 7/19/00, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>on 07/19/00 2:47 PM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>> It seems to me that the participle AGWN here, following as it does the verb
>> hEISEN, is circumstantial and in this instance explains HOW Agamemnon got
>> Chryseis onto the ship
>
>Carl,
>
>Does this mean that circumstantial participles can follow the main verb as a
>general rule? Or is there some particular reason why we should treat this
>like an exception to the normal constituent order?
Clay, I really hate to give an answer like this because I know it's not
very helpful and I know that it really needs to be substantiated by
statistical research and analysis, but my "gut feeling" is that temporally
antecedent circumstantial participles ('after first x'ing') do tend to
precede the main verb which they complement adverbially, while
circumstantial participles that follow directly upon the main verb tend to
answer questions of HOW or WHY.
I still don't know enough about discourse criticism to be able to couch
this in the language of "constituent order." Sorry.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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