[B-Greek] Genitive vs Adjective
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat May 28 09:04:42 EDT 2005
Just a brief reflection on this most recent interchange, which really ought
to have changed subject-header to "Syntax and Word-Order":
Over the past ten years or more I've become increasingly cognizant of what I call
the "Tower of Babel" complex: that academicians (at least they/them) often -- and
often to their chagrin -- don't speak the same language even when they're speaking
the same "language." Social scientists in particular seem by nature to develop their
own dialectal "jargons" within their realms of research and discussion. I've found
problems similar to this matter of "what is syntax?" in my attempt to get at the
nature of middle voice as distinct from active voice: Chet Creider pointed out to
me that my understanding of "active" was inconsistent with standard linguistic usage
of the word, and I'm not sure I've got that properly sorted out yet. We've commented
frequently in this forum on the unfortunate implications of the use of the word "tense"
with its association with temps/time so that beginning Greek students start out thinking
that the tenses indicate time rather that characterize the action of a verb. I personally
think "deponent" is worse than a misnomer and actually a hindrance to understanding the
verbs that have been called "deponent." A. T. Robertson in his big grammar, which is
worth reading through chapter by chapter as much or more than worth using as a reference
work, comments repeatedly on the inadequacy of the traditional terms for many important
grammatical categories in Greek.
I honestly do wish that all of us who want to talk with each other about Greek grammar
should have a mutually-intelligible vocabulary, but I think that the U.S. will adopt
the metric system long before then -- and my hopes for the metric system in the U.S.
are non-existent.
On Saturday, May 28, 2005, at 03:52AM, James Tauber <jtauber at jtauber.com> wrote:
>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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>
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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