[B-Greek] Greek Grammar in terms of Descriptive Linguistics?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at ioa.com
Sun Aug 28 12:02:31 EDT 2005
On Aug 27, 2005, at 6:17 PM, Wayne Leman wrote:
> 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.
That's interesting; is he then responsible for that unwieldy complex
categorization of Greek "deponent" verbs in AGNT? Or does the
responsibility for that lie elsewhere?
>> 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.)
Yes, and i rather suspect that the GNT is too small a sample for
formulation of any really significant data on such a matter.
> 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.
I don't suppose you're speaking of "postpositives" like MEN, DE, GAR
and the like, are you?
> 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.
The Perseus LSJ provides considerable data for this sort of thing,
and although the Perseus textual database is only a fragment of the
TLG database, it is many, many times greater than the database
provided by the GNT.
> 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).
Yes, and this too needs to be done using a database of Hellenistic
Greek that goes far beyond the GNT.
> 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.
On this we have ancient manuals, inasmuch as this was a subject
taught in the schools.
> 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.
Yes, I do think that's worth while.
> 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.
Thanks, Wayne. I'm sure there are many. One of the areas of my
particular interest is a terminology for the morphological paradigms
that is more indicative of semantic functions of the paradigms and
more intelligible. We frequently talk about the misleading
associations between the word "tense" and "time" for the present,
aorist, and perfect systems of the verb. With respect to Voice, my
own continuing question is how best to define or rename ACTIVE,
MIDDLE-PASSIVE and so-called PASSIVE paradigms in terms of the actual
functions of these voice-forms.
>> 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
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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