[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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