[B-Greek] 1 Cor. 14:8 - word order

Chet Creider creider at uwo.ca
Mon May 30 10:01:09 EDT 2005


Iver Larsen wrote:
> As far as I understand it, it is a matter of relative prominence. The less
> predictable an element is, the more it comes to the left, and the more
> predictable it is, the more it comes to the right.

Iver has made this claim a number of times, each one in connection with 
a specific bit of text.  The sum total of these is impressive.  It may 
be of interest to B-Greek readers to know that a similar claim (although 
the direction is reversed) has been made for Czech by the Czech linguist 
Jan Firbas in connection with a critique of the views of 'theme' (as a 
technical term in clause analysis) of Mathesius (theme = old/known 
information) and Travnicek (theme = the sentence element which links 
directly with the object of thought).  The article is "On defining the 
theme in functional sentence analysis" (Travaux Linguistique de Prague 
1.267-280, 1964).  Firbas' uses the term Communicative Dynamism (CD) for 
the phenomenon, which he argues, as does Iver, operates throughout a 
clause, not just at a particular position (e.g. initial or final).  He 
writes: "This tendency ['the basic distribution of CD'] consists in the 
capability of the sentence positions of gradually raising the degree of 
CD, in the direction from the beginning towards the end of the 
sentence." (p.270) [note that this is the opposite from the case with NT 
Greek].  CD is defined as "the extent to which the sentence element 
contributes to the development of the communication, to which it 'pushes 
the communication forward', as it were.  It is obvious that elements 
conveying new, unknown information show higher degrees of CD than 
elements conveying known information." (p. 270).  I don't want to 
suggest that there is an exact equivalence between Firbas' conception 
and that of Iver, only that the ideas of relative prominence (Larsen) 
and CD are related and unique AFAIK in their common emphasis on 
gradation of prominence or CD.

Chet Creider



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