[B-Greek] Genitive vs Adjective

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Sat May 28 03:03:54 EDT 2005


On 28/05/2005, at 1:39 AM, Joseph Weaks wrote:

> On May 27, 2005, at 11:47 PM, James Tauber wrote:
>
>> On 27/05/2005, at 11:30 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> There is a very prominent school of thought in America where  
>>> everything is
>>> syntax and syntax is everything. I have forgotten the name of  
>>> it :-)))
>>>
>>
>> Well, as a realizational morphologist, I hardly subscribe to that  
>> view. But I am puzzled by  what you would consider syntax to be if  
>> changing word order isn't syntax.
>>
>
> Realizational Morphology concerns itself with how one defines/ 
> models/predicts the relationship between inflected/realized forms  
> and underlying lemmas. Not sure how this has anything to do with  
> whether you would call shifting word order in Greek an issue of  
> Syntax.

I was demonstrating that I do not subscribe to the view that  
everything is syntax. Realizational morphology stands in contrast to  
the school of thought Elizabeth was referencing with respect to the  
treatment of morphology as distinct in mechanism from syntax.

> When I hear someone say changing the order of a word may not have  
> anything to do with syntax, I can agree with them

If by "may not have anything to do with" you mean "is primarily  
motivated by something other than" then I absolutely agree. I'm not  
arguing at all against the phenomenon or even the analysis of that  
phenomenon.

> in that the change does not alter the part-of-speech & syntactical  
> function of the word in the clause.

But I don't consider "alter syntax" to only meant "alter part-of- 
speech or syntactical function". When a language changes word order  
over time, that's considered a "syntactic change" by historical  
linguists, even though no parts of speech or "syntactical functions"  
have changed.

My quibble with statements like "moving a word or phrase ... does  
not ... alter the syntax" is simply because, to me, that statement is  
false by definition - it has nothing to do with the particulars of  
any language.

I'm not trying to say something about the way Ancient Greek works,  
merely that this is another example (there are a number) where the  
terminology used in Greek scholarship differs from that common in  
modern linguistics.

And I'm not trying to argue that one definition is necessarily better  
than another. Just trying to point out the confusion that might arise  
because of the differences. I'm sorry if it all came across in any  
other way.

James Tauber



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