[B-Greek] Re: Predicate as topic, word order in Aesop

Chet Creider creider at uwo.ca
Sun Jun 26 20:15:30 EDT 2005


Please excuse my use of paraphrase below -- I want to make several 
comments and multiple cutting and pasting are beyond
the resources of my simple home system.

First a general comment: Aesop and Herodotus were Ionian Greeks who 
lived in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.  The Greek
they wrote or which is attributed to them is both similar to and 
different from NT Greek.  In terms of its use of word order, it
feels different enough to me that I think that any points made with the 
help of it need to be repeated with NT examples
before they are accepted.

Elizabeth Kline gave a nice example of a verb functioning as a linking 
topic in Herodotus (from Helma Dik's book).  This
should not, however, blind us to the fact that the human brain seems to 
prefer places, times and persona over actions as
typical entrees to statements.  In one Western Nilotic language I once 
looked at this in, Dholuo (spoken in Kenya, Uganda
and Tanzania), a verb must be nominalized in order to function as a 
topic. (Probably the handiest reference is: Creider, Chet. 1981. 
Thematisation in Luo. P. Werth, ed., Conversation and Discourse. London: 
Croom Helm, 117-128.)

Randall Buth has written of the importance of distinguishing topic and 
focus and of what he has called marked contextualization. Since I have 
published articles dealing with both of these notions,  I agree 
entirely.  However, I would like to emphasize the
extent to which languages differ in the devices they utilize to signal 
pragmatic notions.  In some languages the core grammatical
system is involved without there being any direct grammaticalization of 
pragmatic notions.  English is an example: the very high
degree of association of (unmarked) topic with subject (and hence 
initial position for the most part) is made possible by the
high frequency of passivization, etc., not by any direct marking of 
topic.  In other languages, such as Japanese and Quechua,
there are topic markers which are independent of core grammatical 
relations.  In the case of Quechua, evidentials function
to a certain extent as focus markers.  Finally, basic word order (where 
such exists) can be very important: the preverbal
focus location found for Herodotus by Dik is characteristic of languages 
with basic order Subject-Object-Verb (e.g. Hungarian), but not AFAIK in 
any other kind of language. Some of this material is available in 
another article by me:
1979. The explanation of transformations. T. Givon, ed., Discourse and 
Syntax. New York: Academic Press, 3-21.

Finally, although it is almost certainly a case of independent invention 
(Iver can confirm this), Iver Larsen's idea of a
gradation of material in NT Greek with the most prominent at the left 
edge and the least prominent at the right edge was
developed quite fully for Czech (the order, however, is reversed) by the 
late Jan Firbas, who used the term Communicative
Dynamism (CD).  He developed his notion as a response to what he felt 
was the inadequacy of theme/rheme (topic/comment)
dichotomies of previous theories.  (So you have some distinguished 
company, Iver!)  I've been very impressed over the
years with the utility if Iver's notion in the context of concrete 
examples, but it should be noted that there are some
potential counterexamples (e.g. focus-final clauses) given for NT Greek 
in Steven Levinsohn's _Discourse Features
of New Testament Greek_ (2nd ed. 2000, Dallas,.Tx: SIL International).

Please excuse the length of this post.  Since word order is so very free 
in NT Greek and since this freedom is not
random (as it may be in some languages -- after quite a bit of work with 
Canadian Inuktitut (Eskimo) I was unable
to discover any way in the language used word order), it is very 
important to understand just how it is being used.

Chet Creider






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