[B-Greek] left marking, right salience in general linguistics

Iver Larsen iver_larsen at sil.org
Wed Jan 3 04:12:30 EST 2007


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Randall Buth" <randallbuth at gmail.com>


> Just a brief note to give a broader linguistic perspective to these word
> order discussions.
>
> Within general linguistics it is considered a language universal that
> salience, the important meaning-bearing part of a communication, naturally
> occurs to the right.
> It is also considered a language universal that special marking occurs to
> the left.
>
> It is NOT considered a language universal that 'marking' means 'emphasis'.
> Stated a different way, there are many reasons for marking.
>
> Hopefully, this will keep discussions within broader parameters.

Since this is formulated as if the stated theory is broadly accepted within general linguistics, I 
need to say a bit more, even though I wanted to stop this discussion for now.

I have the highest respect for my linguistics colleague Randall Buth, especially in his language 
teaching activities, but that does not mean we have to agree about everything. There are many 
different schools of linguistics.
In my opinion, this theory of supposed universals does not result in a satisfactory description of 
how Greek works. What I see as the main problem is that it apparently does not adequately take into 
account that different principles operate at different levels of the grammatical hierarchy that goes 
from morphemes at the bottom level to discourse at the top level. I mentioned this briefly on Dec 
28, so suffice it to say here that my view is that left-prominence operates in Greek mainly at the 
phrase level (governing the order of some of the constituents within the phrase) and to a 
considerable degree at the clause level. (One has to take into account the particular style of the 
author as earlier mentioned.) Right-prominence (or right salience) operates primarily at the 
discourse and paragraph level. At sentence level the two opposite principles meet and create some 
turbulence. At the sentence level, probably the most important way of promoting or demoting 
propositions (clauses) is whether they are expressed with finite verbs (salient/prominent) or 
participles (less salient/prominent). At paragraph and discourse level, background material is 
normally introduced first to describe the setting in terms of time, location and participants. For 
instance, there was a recent question about Luke 2:36. In the paragraph 36-38, the first two verses 
describe the setting in great detail, and only in v. 38 do we get the action, what the highly 
devoted, 84-year old prophetess Anna did when he saw Jesus and what she did afterwards.

Iver Larsen
 




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