[B-Greek] Fronting for Emphasis in 1 John
CWestf5155 at aol.com
CWestf5155 at aol.com
Sat Nov 6 17:17:41 EST 2004
In a message dated 11/6/2004 1:12:06 PM Mountain Standard Time,
edmishoe at yahoo.com writes:
<<There must be some statistical work done for the GNT
to determine "default" word order (anyone know of such
a study?), perhaps by author. This really should not
be a debatable topic. Statistics should settle this
one.
But suppose an author's word order in his/her
sentences typically follow this sequence:
verb+modifiers/subject+modifiers/object+modifiers.
If the author then puts the object+modifiers BEFORE
the verb+modifiers, in this case, putting the
object+modifiers toward the FRONT (left) of the
sentence, then he/she is FRONTING. Since it is out of
his/her default or normal word order pattern, some
linguists conclude that this denotes PROMINENCE or
EMPHASIS.
I think Mitch's question was how can an author intend
to emphasize a word by FRONTING it if he does it too
frequently. If he does it too frequently, one then
must take that into consideration when calculating
this author's NORMAL word order. (His normal word
order now appears to include this FRONTING.)>>
Eddie,
My answer was in fact directed towards these questions but was comparatively
shallow, and potentially misleading. I briefly dealt with assumed default
order vs. marked word order (entertaining the idea that an author's "fronting"
could be idiosyncratic [as you and Mitch are suggesting], stylistic or perhaps
mark prominence--but those three options aren't exhaustive). I addressed the
issue of prominence: emphasis at the discourse level. To read between the
lines, I follow the theory that prominence involves zones of turbulence that
include more than marked word order--I pointed out patterns of repetition (I would
include semantic and formal) and deixis.
Marty touched on some important issues in his post--the definition of
emphasis being primary. I am one of those who distinguish between focus, markedness
and prominence: markedness involves formal emphasis including choices of
things such as word order, lexis and inflection, focus is emphasis at the sentence
level and prominence is emphasis above the sentence level. I use "emphasis"
as a more generic term. Marty clarified that we really have to define these
terms with each other to keep from talking past each other.
Randall's responses on theory were good ones, though he went beyond the
question. His addition of contextualization as an alternative to emphasis/focus is
very important--I call it staging, and it is a basic theory on the linear
processing of texts. But I can see some people describing
contextualization/staging as emphasis on the setting, etc.
The thing is, these are very complex issues, and I struggle with saying too
little vs. too much for this format.
Cindy Westfall
Adjunct Faculty, Mars Hill Graduate School
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