Iver, Moon... little help please

Mark Wilson emory2oo2 at hotmail.com
Wed Feb 28 16:22:06 EST 2001




At the risk of getting yelled at, I would like to give four ENGLISH
examples before I ask a linguistic kind of question, I think :o )

1. Those GOOD disciples
2. Those good DISCIPLES
3. THOSE good disciples
4. Those good disciples

Let's suppose that Greeks can also denote EMPHASIS, by
whatever means, probably word order.

Of the sentences above, number one is EMPHASIZING that the
disciples in question are GOOD ones. Perhaps these disciples acted
in some way that led the writer to conclude they are good.

Alternately, sentence number two is EMPHASIZING that those good
individuals are DISCIPLES (perhaps opposed to a non-disciple kind of group).

However, looking at this same information, I could also say the sentence
number one is talking about "disciples," NOT some other group. True, they
are GOOD ones, but it is important that we realize that the writer has 
chosen
to identify them as "disciples," and not by some other designation.

My question is this:


Is there any difference SEMANTICALLY and/or GRAMMATICALLY in the sentences 
above?

In other words, after all is said and done, all four sentences are 
communicating
the same information at the semantic and grammatical levels, right?

Which is another way of asking, where does EMPHASIS fit in linguistics? Is 
it a
syntactical thing that is kind of nice, but in and of itself carries no 
semantic weight?

Thank you ...linguists  :o )


Mark Wilson


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