[B-Greek] Left order prominence? Or Contextual and Focaldifferences? Some examples from John 1.
Iver Larsen
iver_larsen at sil.org
Tue Dec 26 16:28:44 EST 2006
----- Original Message -----
From: "Randall Buth" <randallbuth at gmail.com>
>
> Of course, the reason that some Greek scholars do not use this 'basic'
> principle is that they think it is wrong. Iver and I have at least
> partially disagreed on this on the list before. (Two 'theory'
> paragraphs follow below, then concrete examples. "Prominence" would
> need some very nuanced definitions in order to handle the
> bi-functionality discussed below.)
Randall, what you are opposing is not the theory that I am proposing. In short e-mails it is not
possible to do justice to the various theoretical positions, especially since this list is not
devoted to linguistic theories, but let me try to explain briefly. I am using "prominence" in a
general sense that is not equivalent to focus or emphasis, and I am not proposing a single scalar
feature. The basic principle works within the phrase, clause and sentence, but as I said, it needs
some fleshing out at each of these levels. At the clause level, one of the ways this might be
fleshed out is by proposing two different kinds of prominence, the two kinds that you call topic and
focus.
I am generally not happy with the dichotomistic theme-rheme (or topic-comment) theory of
linguistics, and not all linguists follow the Prague School. It can explain some features of
some languages, but it does not work well for my mother tongue, Danish, which has much freer word
order than English. (I recently did acrostic translations into Danish of several Psalms, Prov
31:10-31 and Lam 1-4. It was fun and possible because of the flexible word order. Generally
speaking, word order in poetry needs to be handled differently from narrative, and the fronted words
in poetry rarely introduce the topic and are not necessarily in focus.) To me, the dichotomistic
theories of the Prague School are too rigid.
> Consider John 1:14 KAI O LOGOS SARKS EGENETO
> 'and the word flesh became'
> In its context O LOGOS has already received considerable discussion in
> verses 1:1-13. Linguists viewing a distinction between Topic (i.e.
> Contextualiztion) and Focus (marked 'salient' [='juiciest']
> information) can fairly easily distinguish these in this sentence.
I don't have much problem accepting a theory that calls the prominence of hO LOGOS "topic" and the
prominence of SARKS focus. It is a helpful distinction for a number of clauses.
> These same functions and dynamics can be seen in 1:4 (in this
> interpretation of clause breaks)
> O GEGONEN EN AUTW ZWH HN
This is a dubious example, since I believe that the clause break suggested here is wrong. You
ignored EN AUTWI, but I don't know why. With a different clause break, I assume you would call AUTWi
the topic?
For the next one, let me add the preceding clause:
> Ditto for 1:49
SU EI hO hUIOS TOU QEOU, SU BASILEUS EI TOU ISRAEL
I think I could adequately explain this without topic and focus. The fronted SU puts prominence on
the addressee. If you want to call it topic, I can live with that even though I think it is
potentially misleading, because "topic" is used in a theory-specific sense that is different from
normal usage.
I prefer to think of the topic of the first clause as the identification of SU (Jesus) with "Son of
God" and the topic of the second as the description of SU as King (of Israel). (And it does not
clarify it if you call it theme or contextualization.)
In the first clause, the next prominent word is EI ("YOU ARE the son of God", or "you ARE the son of
God", but not "you are the son of God"). It is somewhat of a problem for the analysis that John is
using independent and fronted personal pronouns much more than what is normal in Greek. For
instance, John uses EI without an explicit SU only 8% of the times that he uses EI (2 out of 26),
whereas the percentage in Matthew is 53% and in Mark 50%. Another crude way of looking at it is to
check the number of times John uses the pronoun SU. It is 61 times compared to 54 in Mat, Mrk and
Luk combined and 59 in Acts-Rev combined. A similar pattern holds for John's use of EGW. I think we
all recognize that one needs to take into account the particular author's style, but that does not
make it impossible to work with general principles, as long as you also look at other factors. That
is why I talk about principles, not rules.
In the second clause, there is apparently again prominence on the SU as well as on the concept of
king (but not on the being (EI)). (YOU - or you - are the KING of Israel).
Finally, does your theory help to decide between the two proposed analyses of Acts 18:18? If so, I'd
be interested to hear the result.
Iver Larsen
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