[B-Greek] Definiteness
Brian Abasciano
bvabasciano at gmail.com
Tue Oct 10 12:21:50 EDT 2006
I think an important point that Wallace makes that may deserve attention is that the two major studies (apparently three if you count Colwell himself on some level) on this found no indefinite anarthrous pre-verbal nouns. It may be determined by context, but if the scholars giving focused attention to the issue find no examples of indefinites (apparently based on their assessment of context inter alia), then that is strong evidence for Wallace's rule, at least as a pragmatic observation of actual usage. I suppose this raises all sorts of disagreements about how to best approach grammar, formulating rules, etc., but for those who think there is at least some value in usage based grammatical "rules" or whatever one wants to call them, this may weigh heavily in favor of a general stance of approaching such PN's in accordance with Wallace's "general rule".
What do you think? And what sort of issues/presuppositions do you think are embedded in Wallace's approach? What are the issues in the more theoretical schools of linguistics?
Thanks, and God bless,
Brian Abasciano
Re:
<Dear Brian and Sean,
When I wrote my posts I did not have the grammar of Wallace at hand. But
since Dixon has the view that indefiniteness and quality are mutually
exclusive properties, and because of the way Wallace formulated his rule, I
supposed that this also was the view of Wallace. Thanks to you both for
giving references to Wallace indicating that his view is different from
Dixon?s.
Wallace writes: :"A general rule about the construction can now be stated:
An
anarthrous pre-verbal PN is normally qualitative, sometimes definite,
and only rarely indefinite."
If Wallace really accepts that a PN without article coming before the verb
can be either definite and qualitative or indefinite and qualitative,
this would put his general rule in a very strange light. On this background
his rule is very bad formulated, since the natural understanding of it is
that there are three different categories that cannot be combined. Moreover,
if the categories really can be combined, there simply is no rule at all
dealing with PNs coming before the verb, because in that case it is the
context that decides definiteness, indefiniteness, and quality, and not
discourse function. So I lean back on the following observation: PNs
without article coming before the verb can be either definite or indefinite,
and sometimes the quality of the referent is stressed.
Best regards,
Rolf Furuli
University of Oslo>
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