[B-Greek] Predicate as topic, word order Jc 5:17
Iver Larsen
iver at larsen.dk
Wed Jun 29 03:03:16 EDT 2005
> If I may point out something which may be insultingly obvious to those
> involved in this discussion (or maybe wrong):
>
> It appears to this novice that the "thing" (if you will) that determines
> (and I choose that word on purpose) whether something is prominent in a
> sentence has to do with pragmatics (I'm defining 'pragmatics' here as
> how the words interact with the context. And 'context' is defined as
> not only the text around the text, but also the entire amount of
> relevant information which can reasonably be expected to be known by the
> audience). I actually suspected this as you all were going into this
> discussion and it is rather interesting to me that the evidence being
> brought forth for each side appears to turn on this very thing--
> pragmatics.
Hi, Mike.
I agree with you completely. And the context includes the background
knowledge of the hearers, as you say.
I noticed that Luke 4:25 has the same information about the three years and
six months, which is missing from the OT. RSV says: "But in truth, I tell
you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven
was shut up three years and six months, when there came a great famine over
all the land."
I don't know whether Rabbinic sources can confirm that the 3? years was a
common teaching associated with the Elijah story which might even have
symbolic overtones in view of Daniel, as the UBS Handbook suggests: "It is
not known how this figure was calculated. It is quite possible that this is
taken from a stock phrase that had symbolic associations with a period of
judgment (Dan 7.25; 12.7; compare also Rev 11.2, 3)."
In any case, the time period was probably very well known information to the
original audience, but not to the modern audience. So, a modern reader can
easily come up with a different pragmatic analysis of the text, based on
different background knowledge.
> Might I suggest that this is why it is so very hard to nail down. You
> can't define it in terms of syntax. Syntax is relevant, but it isn't
> the determining factor. The relative saliency of a piece of information
> must be defined in terms of the pragmatic function (which we don't
> understand very well at this point in the development of the art of
> linguistics). Once we understand the pragmatic function, then we'll be
> able to determine how the syntax is used to bring about the saliency.
> What I think we'll see is that certain pragmatic functions will utilize
> one form of syntax while another pragmatic function will utilize a
> different syntax to achieve the same result.
>
> One can't argue from syntax to saliency directly. It's pragmatics to
> saliency with syntactic support.
Yes, authors decide on saliency based on their purpose(s) for the discourse
and the assumed background knowledge of the audience. How that saliency is
expressed by way of context, lexical choices and word order, is the tricky
bit. One of the problems is that much of it is done sub-consciously by the
native speaker of the language, and we do not have native speaker intuition
for Koine Greek.
Another challenge is that we are used to literal translations from NT Greek
into English, and such translations tend to transfer the Greek word order
directly into English. Since English has potential sentence-final focus,
that pragmatic expectation may then be sub-consciously carried back into
Greek. (Danish does not have potential sentence-final focus, but instead can
move almost any element into the front position for the sake of focus).
In the case of James 5:17, most translations would keep the 3? years at the
end of the sentence and thereby suggest a saliency of that item that IMO was
not intended. I was rather surprised that RSV is an exception to that rule,
because it translates 5:17 as:
"Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that
it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the
earth." (Whether this position makes it more or less salient in English, I
am not sure, since I am not a native speaker of English).
GNB has: "Elijah was the same kind of person as we are. He prayed earnestly
that there would be no rain, and no rain fell on the land for three and a
half years."
I would prefer a combination of the two and a free translation in order to
express the pragmatic saliency of the Greek text as I see it:
"Think of Elijah who was like us, just an ordinary person. Yet he prayed his
heart out that it wouldn't rain, and as you know, there was no rain at all
for three and a half years in the whole land."
Of course, an added problem with English is that saliency is often expressed
by word stress which is usually not written. It is up to the audience to
stress what they guess is salient from their background understanding and
from the clues they find in the text.
The pragmatic saliency is very important for accurate translations, if we
define "accuracy" in terms of communicative equivalence rather than in terms
of "sticking closely to the original text" (including keeping the word order
of the original as much as possible.)
So, the more we can learn about pragmatic saliency, the better translations
we can expect. I am still learning.
Iver Larsen
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