[B-Greek] focus stress and word order

Chet Creider creider at uwo.ca
Thu Jun 30 07:11:01 EDT 2005


Iver Larsen wrote:

>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).
>  
>
[omitted material]

>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.
>
Have there ever been any attempts to describe intonation for NT Greek?  
There is a very clear description for modern Greek
in _Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language_ by Holton, 
Mackridge and Philippaki-Warburton (who is the author of the following 
quote), Routledge 1997:

"With neutral intonation on an utterance the main stress falls naturally 
on the last constituent, interpreted as the focus.  However, there is an 
alternative strategy for rendering a constituent focal, and this is by 
placing emphatic stress on it irrespective of its position within the 
sentence. ... A constituent in focus may alse be moved to the beginning 
of the sentence while keeping its emphatic stress. .... If a sentence 
contains both a topic and a focus at the beginning of the sentence, the 
topic is placed before the focus.  The preferred arrangment in such 
cases is to start with the topic and place the focus immediately before 
the verb.  The topic in such constructions is more likely to represent a 
dislocated topic and to be accompanied by intonation fall:"
[all claims illustrated with examples]

This is quite remarkable as it makes modern Greek first very much like 
English (Iver's description is accurate), then focus-first, and finally 
as Dik describes Attic Greek!!

Devine and Stephen's _The Prosody of Greek Speech_  (Oxford U P, 1994), 
which deals with Attic Greek for the most part, has a chapter entitled 
"Topic and Focus" and in it a very interesting section, "Discontinuous 
Noun Phrases" (pp 480-87) in
which they argue that in discontinuous nouns phrases in which the 
modifier is separated from its head, in Greek, this is most
often associated with focus on the modifer (which is moved leftward) and 
with "comparatively low informational content" for
the head noun.  These discontinuous phrases have been studied further by 
the same authors in their _Discontinous syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek_ 
(OUP, 2000).  Rightward movement, associated with an afterthought, is 
sometime found but is much less common than leftward movement of a 
focused element.

Chet Creider



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