[B-Greek] Greek Grammar in terms of Descriptive Linguistics?

Wayne Leman wayne_leman at sil.org
Sat Aug 27 18:17:22 EDT 2005


Carl, your suggestion seems reasonable to me. I've always been fascinated 
when I have attended linguistics conferences, when papers have been 
presented by linguists on Greek, since I had studied Koine Greek previously 
in theological school. Good research has and is being done on Modern Greek 
from within the various theoretical viewpoints of modern linguistics. Some 
modern linguists have focused their attention on Koine Greek. I recall a 
M.A. thesis on Koine Greek clause structure, including relationships between 
an independent verb and a verb which is subordinate to it. The thesis 
concentrated on "clause-unions," as I recall. It was written by now Dr. 
Stephen Marlett of SIL Int'l. A Ph.D thesis was written at the Univ. of 
Minnesota on word order patterns of Koine Greek. I believe that the entire 
N.T. was morphologically tagged from the research of that project. That 
thesis was written by Tim Friberg, and many on this list have probably used 
a Greek N.T. annotated with the Friberg morphological glosses.

>From my own viewpoint, some of the issues of Greek of any stage of the 
language which should be described any any linguistic approach (whether a 
classical or modern) approach would include:

1. What causes different word orders within a clause? (I think usually there 
are pragmatic triggers) Word order issues are often discussed on this 
discussion list and a number of subscribers seem to have a good grasp of 
what causes some clause elements to appear clause-initially. From my 
viewpoint, it is not necessary to follow a particalar theoretical model to 
adequately describe the phenomena, but models can push us to see things we 
might not otherwise. (I tend to be rather atheoretical, overall, even though 
I have studied and worked within a number of different linguistic models. I 
think it is more important to be as precise and thorough as possible than it 
is to tie a language description to a particular theory. That's my personal 
leaning.)

2. A thorough description of the #2 position in a Greek clause--I forget its 
technical name, it has a German name, I think, named for a German scholar. 
The fact that certain Greek word classes typically occur not in the first 
position in a clause, but in the second position is theoretically 
interesting, and must be mastered by anyone who wants to understand Greek 
well. It is possible that some of the "movement" constraint rules of 
later-Chomskyan theory would help with this phenomenon.

3. Further work can be done on the semantic structures of Greek lexica (of 
different dialects and stages of developement of the language). Different 
descriptive linguistic frameworks can be used. One that was used in the 
1960s or 1970s was called case grammar and was sometimes used to describe 
what nouns could co-occur with what verbs. Reference was made to case frames 
and verb frames. I haven't been able to keep up with more recent theory of 
linguists as I would like, but I suspect that theoretical frameworks such as 
Lexical Functional Grammar or its theoretical descendents would have value 
in describing collocations contraints and other features of the Greek 
lexicon.

4. The rhetorical (pragmatic and/or discourse) functions of Greek 
conjunctions. KAI and hOTI do not simply concatenate nouns or verbs, but 
they often perform higher level rhetorical functions. There have been some 
descriptions of the discourse functions of Greek conjunctions 
("connectors"), including some by SIL members (see website: 
http://www.ethnologue.com for some publications on Biblical Greek).

5. Even though modern descriptive linguistics has traditionally not paid 
much attention to rhetoric, the rhetorical devices used by Greek orators and 
authors are very important. Many of those on this list have worked with 
classical grammars that describe many of these kinds of rhetoric. No study 
of Greek is complete without reference to language forms used to express 
sarcasm, irony, logical flow of argumentation, etc. IMO, study of rhetoric 
is a legitimate area of study for linguistics. It doesn't matter to me if 
there are not clever models for describing rhetoric.

6. Ellipsis: many, if not most, languages have various ways of leaving out 
some elements of a clause or sentence, when it can be clearly understood by 
those hearing or reading what has been syntactically omitted. The study of 
Greek ellipsis is important and can be described with fairly basic models of 
descriptive linguistics. The study of Greek ellipsis can have important 
results for better translation of Biblical Greek to English, for those for 
whom this is an area of interest. English and Greek do not ellipsize in the 
same ways and translators need to know how to adjust for those differences.

Oh, I'm sure there are many other areas of study which don't come to my mind 
right now, but I hope this will help further some discussion of the kind 
that Carl has suggested.

Wayne
-----
Wayne Leman
Better Bibles Blog: http://englishbibles.blogspot.com

> I would suggest that it might be a much more useful and mutually
> enlightening discussion if we might sketch out what elements properly
> BELONG to a "descriptive-linguistic" account of ancient Greek or
> Biblical Greek language.
>
>
> Carl W. Conrad




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