[B-Greek] technical vocabulary

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Sat Jun 16 14:11:43 EDT 2007


On Jun 16, 2007, at 4:14 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:

> My appreciation (and, I trust, that of many other B-Greekers) for
> James Ernest's query and for all these endeavors to throw open the
> doors and illuminate the murky corners of what have seemed (to me, at
> least) to be long-trailing corridors of the Discourse-Critical wing
> of what I've often termed the Tower of Babel termed Linguistics,
> where theorists ponder and speak to or at each other in a great
> variety of unknown tongues about misty matters.

Carl,

I agree that the terminology is confusing. In no small part this is  
due to too many authors using too many different words to say the  
same thing and the same words to mean different things. The same  
problem holds for reference books on greek grammar, for example the  
treatment of verb aspect.

On the other-hand, the number of terms that need to be mastered to  
talk about pragmatic marking in NT Greek is quite small and the fog  
factor is not insurmountable. Chapter eleven of Dooley & Levinsohn is  
not very long and they explain up front how the different major works  
have used the terminology. For example some authors use Topic-Comment  
& Topic-Focus as equivalents. Dooley & Levinsohn depart from this,  
they use the word Focus to identify a focal constituent within the  
Comment. If you don't get this issue sorted out right away then you  
will come to grief reading Levinsohn's more technical work (DFNTG,  
2000).

Here is a quote from Dooley & Levinsohn page 31-31

--quote--
The SCOPE OF FOCUS for a given sentence can vary with the context. To  
reflect this, Lambrecht proposes
three types of focus structure. In answer to a question like “What  
happened?”, the entire sentence (41)
would be in focus (SENTENCE FOCUS). In answer to a question like  
“What’s going on with my daughter?”,
the predicate just killed a bear would be the focus (PREDICATE  
FOCUS). Finally, in answer to a question
such as “What did my daughter just kill?”, a bear would be the focus  
(ARGUMENT FOCUS). Such formal
ambiguity due to scope of focus is generally clarified by the context  
(Chomsky 1971:199ff; Sperber &
Wilson 1986:202ff).
While Lambrecht’s types of scope for focus serve well as answers to  
the above questions in English,
variations of constituent order within a predicate focus are often  
found in text material. Consequently, we find it useful to identify a  
smaller constituent as focus. For this reason, we will use the term  
“COMMENT” as an alternative for “predicate focus,” and speak of the  
smaller focused constituent as “FOCUS PROPER” or
simply “focus”; see Section 11.3.
--end quote--

One doesn't need to master all the terminology for text-linguistics  
to do analysis of constituent order in Hellenistic Greek. The number  
of terms you need to learn can be counted on one hand. It is the  
concepts that require some getting used to. For those steeped in the  
morphological and syntactical approach to language analysis,  
pragmatic analysis of constituent order seems to operate by a set of  
rules that are very foreign and it is easy to just write it all off  
as so much subjective nonsense. I have some respect for bible  
translation professionals. I don't think the SIL people would waste  
their time on this approach if all id did was give them something to  
talk about in their workshops.


Elizabeth Kline







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