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

Wayne Leman wayne_leman at sil.org
Sun Aug 28 14:39:29 EDT 2005


I said:

>> 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.
>

Carl asked:

> That's interesting; is he then responsible for that unwieldy complex 
> categorization of Greek "deponent" verbs in AGNT?

I suspect he is, Carl.

<snip>

>> 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?

Yes, I am referring to these postpositives, but in linguistics there is a 
long German word named for a German man, something like Haufnagel's position 
(I keep forgetting it; it's much easier to remember a descriptive term like 
postposition). There are a number of languages where the second position in 
a clause is syntactically important. Not all parts of speech which appear in 
second position in such languages are postpositions, however, at least not 
if they phonologically attach (cliticize) to the preceding word. (I don't 
know if Greek postpositives do.)


>
<snip>
>

I said:

>> 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).
>

Carl:

> Yes, and this too needs to be done using a database of Hellenistic  Greek 
> that goes far beyond the GNT.

Yes.

>

>> 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.

Right. One could even put a few small rocks in one's mouth and practice 
Greek rhetoric!  :-)

>
<snip>

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




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