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

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Wed Jan 3 15:44:29 EST 2007


Shalom Iver,

My post was not intended as an answer but to get people to thinking
linguistically in their discussions. Others have read my post as an
answer, as well. Forgive my brevity.
Please note the PS to a follow-up on this thread:

"PS: please note that the original note does not ANSWER the discussions
on this list. It is simply a reminder that they take place within what
is known about languages in general. The word 'prominence' and
'emphasis' are quite easy to misconstrue or misapply, which is why I
wrote the note. Also, the existence of 'left-marking' among languages
does not mean that there cannot be 'right-marked' structures in a
langauge. It is just that left-marking appears to be a language
universal.

"On the other hand, the functions and frequency of left-marking are
widely divergent among languages and this is where the discussion
needs to be with Greek. There is also a question about what
constitutes 'left-marking' in a flexible word order systems like Greek
and the Slavic languages."

There are two questions with regard to a 'left prominence' rule.

One concerns your definition of prominence. In your email you seem to
equate salience and importance with prominence. You wrote
"(salient/prominent)". I will discuss this in point two. Now
'prominence' might be interpreted as 'highted visability', in which
case it is synonomous with 'marking'. However, I see you consistency
refusing such a definition, which leaves prominence undefined or
defined in ways that skew readings. Likewise, I don't hear you
mentioning 'topicality' as a definition for 'prominence', which is
fine, since I would argue that it doesn't give complete coverage. But
if 'prominence' equals 'marking', then we would have considerable
agreement, since we would agree on many cases where
pragmatic/syntactic 'marking' has taken place.

Point two: If you mean 'left-marked salience', 'left-marked
importance', then we do have a disagreement. Probably not only in
Greek but in other languages as well. For example, in Hebrew I get
students who have been told that fronted items are 'emphatic'. But
when reading texts they come to inconsistent apllications of this.
E.g., Jonah 1.4 has 'the Lord' throw down a storm and fronted.
Students may say that this shows that 'God' was the cause of the storm
and that this was important for the author. But that is not the
immediate point (the storm itself was the prominent point, and a 'big'
one, like everything else in the book), nor does it explain why God is
not so focused anywhere else in the story, nor does it adequately deal
with how the structure is used elsewhere in Hebrew narrative. Part of
its meaning is to block the vav-ha-hippux (sequential verb system) of
Hebrew. It typically takes students about 100 or 200 examples of this
structure in order to get a good handle on it. (Verse 1:5 breaks the
narrative flow to suspend a crisis point, and 1:5b back tracks in
time. Just part of the hebrew narrative system.)
Now the point. One cannot "disprove" such readings of students, even
though they are poor. A person can always say "in my view/in the
author's view" this was the important point. One can read any text and
make such a claim. But it does not make it a good reading or a
sensitive reading to the whole language system. The fact that a
student can always say that 'something' is somehow the main point,
does not prove the system, but it might prevent a student from seeing
the system. So how does one learn a system?

In a previous post you agreed that John 1:14 "O LOGOS SARKS EGENETO"
was reasonable to read as LOGOS setting up a Topic and SARKS being a
marked point of importance. An example like this makes a simple 'left
prominence rule' misleading unless reinterpreted and more nuanced in
definition. In terms of overall relative importance, SARKS is the main
point and the reason that the sentence was written. Verses 1-13 had
already mentioned the existence of the LOGOS. The LOGOS was mentioned
in order to maintain reference and tracking while re-starting a unit,
but it was not the salient hight  point of its clause. SARKS was the
salient highpoint. It is second in position, a common position in
Greek and other languages that frequently have multiple frontings.
(Please note: I am not claiming that "second position" is marking
'most salient' in Greek, only that 'most salient' items can end up in
second position. In any case, such readings are collected, along with
watching thousands of other examples.

The point here, and it is difficult to imagine you disagreeing, is
that DIFFERENT forces were at work in the order at John 1:14. SARKS
does not just have a lesser degree of whatever made LOGOS first.
(though I would would agree that SAKRS is less-topical here, though
you have not claimed that left-topicality is the function of Greek
word order, in any case.)  SARKS has a another kind of prominence, a
'main point' prominence. Which is why I insist on seeing more than one
kind of special marking. (And, incidently, there are Danish linguists
who quite readily agree with such nuanced readings. This is not a case
of English versus Danish mother-tongue.)

If we agree on the functions of LOGOS and SARKS in John 1:14, can't
you include that in your definition of 'prominence'?

ἔρρωσο
ERRWSO
Randall Buth

PSS: This affects sentence after sentence. Definitions must be set and
understood if we are going to correctly read text. John 1:1: was the
author "assuming" the LOGOS existence and trying to say emphatically
that it was EN ARXH 'in the beginning'? (Not the best reading, I would
say.) Or was the author using EN ARXH as a starting point (not the
main point!), to which the new, important, and unexpected point was
predicated, that the 'LOGOS was there'.  (This is not specially
marked, just normal syntax and salience following a marked beginning
point. Of course, even with the system understood one can still
'midrash' something and do all sorts of things with EN ARXH/breshit.)


-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com


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