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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