[B-Greek] Genitive vs Adjective
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Wed May 25 19:21:22 EDT 2005
On Wednesday, May 25, 2005, at 07:03PM, Mitch Larramore <mitchlarramore at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>Elizabeth:
>
>About this...
>> > Word
>> > order emphasis is a syntactical issue, not a
>> > grammatical one ...
>
>you said...
>>
>> This statement has several problems. The relocation
>> of a word or phrase for
>> the purpose of emphasis does NOT fall into the
>> domain of syntax.
>> Syntax as a topic certainly is a sub-domain of
>> grammar.
>
>
>Here's the definition of syntax:
>
>Defines the word classes of language, ie, nouns,
>verbs, etc..and the rules for their combination, ie,
>which words can combine and in what order.
>
>How is it that the "relocation of a word or phrase for
>the purpose of emphasis" is not syntax? To me, syntax
>deals with the position and relation of
>words/phrases/clauses to other syntactical units.
>Words/phrases thrust to the front of the sentence
>(that do not normally occupy such a position) seem to
>be for emphasis, as I think Iver Larsen likes to
>argue. Please help me understand your comment.
Well, Elizabeth will have her own answer, but I think that Iver Larsen would agree
that word-order is not necessarily a part of syntax in Greek.
In English, of course, it may be so, because in English we tend to identify
subject and object in relationship to position before or after the verb. So in
English, there's a world of difference between "Man bites dog" and "Dog bites man":
in the former "man" is the subject and "dog" the object, while in the latter "dog"
is the subject and "man" is the object. But if we look at a corresponding pair of
sentences in Greek:
hO ANQRWPOS DAKNEI TON KUNA,
note that we could write this with the subject
and object reversed:
TON KUNA DAKNEI hO ANQRWPOS
The meaning of the second formulation is essentially the same as that of the first
formulation, because the syntactic relationships between subject and object are
indicated by grammatical case-endings, NOT by word-order.
So I think it's important NOT to confuse word-order with syntax; in some languages
word-order may be a key to syntactical relationships, but by-and-large it isn't in
ancient Greek.
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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