[B-Greek] technical vocabulary

Carl W.Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Jun 16 18:04:39 EDT 2007


On Jun 16, 2007, at 2:11 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

>
> 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.

This is unquestionably true -- and aspect studies is unquestionably  
an excellent illustration of the problem of jargon. Nor do I dispute  
the inconsistent terminology employed in reference grammars to  
describe syntactic usage. I do believe that most of what I have  
argued about ancient Greek voice is to be found in the better  
reference works on Greek grammar, especially Smyth; what I have tried  
to do is rationalize what's set forth in a dozen or more different  
places within the grammars and show that it's no so anomalous once  
one dispenses with the obfuscating terminology and concept of  
deponency. I have certainly expressed my dismay and disdain  
repeatedly for the multiplication of syntactic categories, especially  
those based upon how constructions are translated into English rather  
than how they function in the Greek.

> 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.

I don't doubt this. I spent some time this morning looking at  
Lambrecht's _Information Structure and Sentence Form_ in Google Books  
this morning and have about decided to invest in it.

My comment to which you are responding, for all it may appear to be  
so, is not a repudiation of any light that Linguists can throw upon  
the workings of ancient Greek so much as a powerful wish that the  
light thrown by them could be brighter and clearer than it has been.  
My hesitation to look to Linguistics for the salvation of our  
understanding of the workings of ancient Greek is not unrelated to my  
feeling that the Social Sciences generally offer us more in the way  
of interesting theories about the ways in which human beings interact  
than solid, verifiable hypotheses.

You and I may come at ancient Greek texts from different directions,  
Elizabeth, but I think that we are both looking for better ways of  
accounting for what we read and how we read it and neither of us is  
quite content with the inadequacies of what we have to put up with.  
BLEPOMEN GAR ARTI DI' ESOPTROU EN AINIGMATI ...   We are stuck on  
ARTI and we "keep on keeping on" DI' ESOPTROU EN AINIGMATI BLEPONTES.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/





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