Linguistics and opposite conclusions

Trevor & Julie Peterson 06peterson at cua.edu
Sun Oct 27 08:02:00 EST 2002


Ron wrote:

> but Porter chooses
> the dubious path of going for the most numerous in the NT as the default
> tense.  The problem that I see with this is that the NT is essentially
> occasional writing, meaning that we have such a small sample of it in
> general that one can hardly judge a default tense by use of statistics.

I'm not that familiar with the studies in question, but if this is an
accurate description of the methodology, I would agree that it's a dubious
approach. There are a couple of problems here that I think are worth noting.
One is that numbers on their own are not always significant. Perhaps an
analogy could be taken from computer use. My computer came with default
settings, including the appearance of my desktop. Now, it's possible (I
really don't know) that most people leave their desktop appearance as it is
when they get the computer. But I suspect that a lot of people change
it--several times even. So a statistical analysis of the most popular
desktop settings would not necessarily give you the default. It would only
tell you that users have a relatively high level of freedom to set their
desktops as they choose and a relatively high level of preference for
certain settings. The default may in fact be one of the least common
settings. Now, what I think makes this a particularly good analogy is that
people often communicate about themselves by the desktop settings they
choose. The default is the default because it communicates nothing. It
provides an unmarked starting point and allows for maximal variation away
from that starting point to serve the communicative needs of the users.
Language does very much the same thing. We don't communicate by preserving
unmarked (default) constructions.

So it may very well be that the highest numbers are a factor of the way a
given grammatical feature fits into the rest of the puzzle. An example I was
looking at recently was the structure of participial clauses in Biblical
Hebrew. (I realize this is a Greek list, but bear with me--I think the
principles apply regardless of the language in question.) It's one thing to
count the numbers of given word orders that appear in the Bible. It's
another to factor in issues like--why are participial clauses used in the
literature we're looking at? They tend to function in narrative as carriers
of circumstantial information. But if that use is marked somehow, then the
majority constructions of participial clauses in narrative may not be the
default. Basically, my point is that linguists need to think about a lot of
different factors--not just the numbers by the whys and hows that explain
the numbers as we find them. But this gets us into a lot of things happening
under the surface, so to speak, which means we're having to infer from what
we can see and don't always know for sure what the best explanation is.

The other problem, and perhaps more to the point of the question, is that
we're dealing with a limited amount of material. We can expand the sampling
by considering contemporary literature, but even then we're not going to
come close to what linguists are able to do with living languages. If I want
to examine the way a linguistic phenomenon works, I can ask native speakers
to say things that I think will produce that phenomenon. If things don't
come out the way I expected, I can refine my inquiries and gather more
relevant data. Because language has practically infinite capacity to
generate new utterances, I can do this as much as I need to. With a dead
language, all I have are texts. If those texts won't answer my questions, I
can't do much about that. So applying the methodology of modern linguistics
to biblical texts has its challenges. We have to do a lot more guesswork and
filling in blanks. At some point, we have to say that we just don't know,
but the attempt is to push back the boundaries as far as we can.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics




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