[B-Greek] H vs. QH passives in Homer

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Sat Feb 2 17:05:44 EST 2008


On Feb 2, 2008, at 3:48 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:

> You are quite right about this: there's no temporal axis. On the  
> other hand, I rather think that an endeavor to provide one would  
> fail because of the difficulty of dating specific verses or blocks  
> of text within the Homeric corpus. Certainly Aristarchus and  
> Aristophanes of Byzantium obelized verses that they deemed  
> interpolated or added to the text later, but there is an  
> unavoidable subjectivity in this business of assigning portions of  
> the corpus to one era or another. On the other hand, one can  
> analyze the data, as I think Allan has done, and take note of where  
> the different semantic categories fall within morphological types  
> in the extant corpus as a whole. I think it's a safe assumption  
> (others might not) that the -QH- forms are later-emergent than the  
> simpler -H- forms. And as I noted, Allan goes on in later chapters  
> to show how the -QH- forms extend over a wider range of semantic  
> categories than they did in the Homeric corpus.

Carl,

I think we are in agreement on several issues. Particularly the  
unavoidable subjectivity. There seems to be a lot of speculation in  
chapter three. I don't think this is the strong portion of this book.  
After a few more hours of trying to make sense of his argument I once  
again looked at his conclusions for this chapter to see where he was  
trying to go with it.

I find his conclusions less than convincing. On pages 174-176 Allan  
tries to define his high level abstract schema for the -(Q)H- aorists  
and sigmatic middles: "I would like to suggest that the abstract  
meaning of the passive in -(Q)H- can best be characterized in  
relation to the notion of prototypical patient." The prototypical  
patient as defined by Langaker 1991:285 has the following essential  
properties:

1 - inanimacy
2 - non-volitionality
3 - presence of an external initiator
4 - internal change of state

Allan claims that -(Q)H- aorists meet at least one of the criteria  
for a  prototypical patient. The most common criteria for -(Q)H-  
aorists is #4 "internal change of state". This is one criteria that  
sets -(Q)H- aorists apart from sigmatic middles in his sample. The  
sigmatic middles in his sample are all animate and agentive and do  
not undergo an internal change of state.

Since it isn't at all difficult to find -(Q)H- aorists with animate  
subjects it seems to me that trying to pin the prototypical patient  
label on -(Q)H- aorists is a lost cause. I have reservations about  
his statement on page 175 "in the table it can be observed that the  
passive forms have subjects which are prototypical patients or, which  
have a semantic feature in common with a the prototypical patient."  
The first part of this statement is really misleading since few if  
any of his examples meet all four criteria for a prototypical  
patient. Furthermore, under the categories "collective motion" and  
"body motion" the  -(Q)H- aorists HGERQHN and  hWRMHQHN are both  
agentive and animate which clearly disqualifies them from being  
prototypical patients. What sets HGERQHN and  hWRMHQHN apart from  
sigmatic middles is #4, they undergo an internal change of state.


Elizabeth Kline







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