Word Order
Moon-Ryul Jung
moon at saint.soongsil.ac.kr
Fri Oct 6 21:04:03 EDT 2000
I read the thread on word order with a great interest.
I would like to discuss it further. Here is the starting point for
discussion.
[Wayne]
>
> >I personally don't think NT
> > Greek has any underlying *syntactic* word order . . .
>
[Clay]
> This may be the case but if NT Greek does not have some sort of "unmarked
> word order" were are you going to get your pragmatic marking for point of
> departure and so forth? You cannot have "fronted" elements unless you have
> an unmarked word order. It is like having black camels crossing a black
> desert at night. You need to have a basic pattern or you have no marking
at
> all.
[Wayne]
I understand what you are saying, Clay, but I still don't think you have
to
have an unmarked word order in order (!) to recognize pragmatic word
ordering.
The above discussion led me to think that perhapse the unmarked word order
of Koine Greek is a partial order. Given for examples elements A,B,C,D,E,
a partial order may be defined by A < B, C< D , D < E. In this order,
C can be placed anywhere, the order between A and C is not defined,
etc. Any ordering can be said to satisfy this partial order as long as
it is true that A < B, C <D, D < E.
What do you think of the "partial unmarked word order"?
Moon
Moon-Ryul Jung
Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea
has "partial unmarked worGeao
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