[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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