[B-Greek] Genitive vs Adjective

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Sat May 28 03:52:24 EDT 2005


On 28/05/2005, at 3:20 AM, Joseph Weaks wrote:
> This is a good point, James. Namely, that the terminology is used  
> differently.

That was actually the only point I was trying to make (albeit badly) :-)

> In linguistics, syntax isn't reduced to simply word order, of course.

Right. There are things like constituent structure, agreement, anaphora.

Incidently, what gets called "syntax" by a lot of the intermediate  
grammars is largely what I would describe as mapping grammatical  
relations (e.g. SUBJECT) to semantic roles (e.g. AGENT). Ironically,  
in a language like Ancient Greek, the grammatical relations have far  
less to do with "syntax" in my sense of the term than in a language  
like English.

In English, grammatical relations are predominantly determined by  
word order rather than morphology whereas in Greek, the word order  
matters less in determining grammatical relations and morphology  
takes on that role.

And here is the crux of the terminology confusion. Consider the  
previous paragraph. You could replace "word order" with "syntax" and  
it would mean the same thing to a formal linguist. I suspect you  
could replace "grammatical relation" with "syntax" and it would mean  
the same thing to a Greek scholar.

So here's a way to understand each other:

A. Whenever I see someone say "syntax", I'll read it as "grammatical  
relations".

That way "word order doesn't always alter syntax in Greek" reads to  
me as "word order doesn't always alter grammatical relations" and  
I'll agree.

B. Whenever one sees me say "syntax", one should read it as  
"constituent structure, word order, etc"

That way "word order doesn't always alter syntax in Greek" reads as  
"word order doesn't always alter constituent structure, word order,  
etc in Greek" and you'll see what it's a contradiction.

:-)

James Tauber






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