two models?
Trevor Peterson
06PETERSON at cua.edu
Thu Oct 24 08:28:39 EDT 2002
>===== Original Message From Michael Burer <burer at bible.org> =====
>It seems that people on this list tend to fall
>into one of two camps (perhaps "models" is better, although I'm open to
>an even better word): those who speak in terms of traditional
>morpho-syntactical analysis and those who speak in terms of discourse
>analysis. Inevitably someone makes a comment (like that made above)
>which implies that one is better than the other or that at this point in
>scholarship all reputable scholars are heading towards one at the
>expense of the other. What I want to hear is justification for comments
>like this.
This seems like something of an oversimplification, although it may very well
be a fair assessment of this list. Perhaps a better angle would be to say that
there are those who follow a traditional analysis and those who try to stay on
the cutting edge of modern linguistics. (Actually, this might be something of
a continuum.)
>
>Let me put my cards on the table: Most all of my Greek has been taken
>under the tutelage of Wallace at Dallas Seminary. I am thoroughly
>steeped in morpho-syntactical analysis. I like to talk about objective
>and subjective genitives, gnomic presents, and the like. As I have
>progressed in my education I have tried to learn about discourse
>analysis and broader linguistic matters but I have not yet studied them
>in depth. I know that this field is growing, but I am not initiated into
>it yet.
Your experience is probably not unlike that of many others on this list.
Speaking for myself, I might be a bit further along in the process, but the
general flow has been the same.
>
>Here's what I would like to see someone succinctly state: What makes
>discourse analysis (or other comparable fields) better for studying NT
>Greek than the traditional methods that I imagine most of us learned?
DA helps to fill out the picture of what language does. It allows linguists to
consider elements beyond the sentence level (which is almost always a part of
linguistic usage). DA does not eliminate the usefulness of studying other
aspects of language, but it provides another area of inquiry that can shed
light on just about everything else.
>
>I'll make the first volley based upon what I know (which I'll admit is
>limited), and I look forward to being informed further on this matter: I
>do not see discourse analysis eclipsing morpho-syntactical analysis.
>Instead, I see them as complimentary or perhaps as a pyramid. One must
>learn accidence, morphology, and word formation in order to even start
>reading anything of a Greek text (or any foreign language text for that
>matter).
Yes, you have to learn about these things to start. But that's not the same as
saying that you cannot also start learning about DA from the very beginning.
Arguably, a person could spend a good deal of time studying grammar and
linguistics before ever picking up a Greek textbook. Such study would
contribute to the person's ability to grasp Greek grammar, even though it
wouldn't come close to providing everything a person needed. Similarly, a
person can start learning about DA as a component of learning Greek (or any
other language). As I think Bryan Rocine's introductory Hebrew grammar
demonstrates, DA can provide a useful framework for understanding the
intrinsic features of a language apart from their translational equivalence.
What does that mean? In a lot of cases, students spend much of their time
learning a foreign language by comparison with their own language. They learn
categories that describe how words should be translated more than what those
words actually do in and of themselves. (I'm trying to be rather general
here--I don't mean to speak of words as opposed to grammatical constructions,
which are also made up of words.) This is a fault especially of the sort of
thing you get from Wallace. The risk students run is that they will always
think of how Greek works through the eyes of English translation method. I
think Rocine has tried (and at least to a certain extent succeeded) to
establish a framework for understanding language function more abstractly. If
I learn aorist as a simple past tense, I can easily attach a lot of baggage
from English that doesn't necessarily belong to the Greek form. If, on the
other hand, I learn its use as the tense of simple past narrative (or some
such thing), I can think in terms of its real function, rather than a limited
English parallel. DA provides a conceptual framework to approach things in
this way.
But more to the point of your question, I would agree that there is a
complementary relationship here. The problem is that I don't think DA
proponents are trying to jettison everything that goes into a traditional
grammar. Students still need to learn how to parse verbs, for instance. The
terminology and semantic understanding might change with new insights, but the
need to analyze the form of a word is still going to be there. I think the
issue is with the way we make the jump to semantics. Modern linguistics has
moved in the direction of establishing rules that can govern how language
works, which is generally thought to be more useful than lists of categories
that require more gut feel to assign.
The bottom line is that we need to ask ourselves whether we're going to apply
the insights linguistics has to offer. Some grammars give the appearance of
ignoring everything linguists have achieved in the past fifty years. Maybe
this is due in some cases to an intentional disagreement with the usefulness
or validity of such systems. But I suspect that for many students and teachers
of NT Greek the major issue is ignorance of the field.
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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