[B-Greek] BMCR review of Rijksbaron's Verbal Syntax book - linguistic terminology
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Feb 18 07:11:09 EST 2008
In a first-rate review (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2008/2008-02-24.html
= http://tinyurl.com/2mhqea) of an important book (Albert
Rijksbaron, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek:
An Introduction. Third edition {American edition} - for details, see
my BG message of June 24, 2007,
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2007-June/043417.html = http://tinyurl.com/2agn8x)
, Coulter George makes some useful comments that bear on my recurrent
complaint about terminological gobbledygook in the writing of
linguists. To reiterate yet once again ("ad nauseam") what I've said
before, the linguists have much to tell us that is very useful about
the way ancient Greek works, but they seem to have great difficulty in
articulating it so that we can understand it.
For instance, what is it that a verb "describes" or "refers to" or
"indicates"? It is an "action," an "act," an "event," a "happening"?
Whatever it is, why can't we all use the same term when we talk about
it? Here's Coulter George:
"Of course, any book that tries to cover as much ground as this in
such a small amount of space will inevitably suffer from some
shortcomings caused by compression of the material. In particular,
unfamiliar grammatical terminology, often derived from FG, is not
always explained in great enough detail for its use to be justified in
a work presumably aimed at readers with relatively little Greek. One
example is Rijksbaron's use of the term "'state of affairs', instead
of 'action', as a cover term for 'that which is expressed by a
predication'" (p. 3, n. 4), in contexts like "the [historic] present
marks states of affairs that are of decisive importance for the
story" (p. 22). On the one hand, Rijksbaron is absolutely right to
note that "action" is a poor choice to express this concept, for, as
he says, it is generally restricted to particular types of states of
affairs. On the other hand, "state of affairs" is itself problematic
in that it has "state" as its head noun, a term which should also be
restricted to particular states of affairs, namely those in which no
dynamic action takes place and which, in Greek, are associated with
the perfect--and not, for example, the decisive turning-points marked
by the historic present (see below). While there do not seem to be any
terms for this that are completely free from criticism, I suspect that
"event" (more accessible) or "eventuality" (more technically correct)
would yield a much smoother reading than "state of affairs" in most
instances."
Of particular interest to B-Greekers (I think) is the discussion of
Rijksbaron's account of the so-called "historical present." Of this
usage Rijksbaron distinguishes two categories: those in which it marks
a decisive _state of affairs_ (i.e. event) and those in which it does
not. Says George, " ... had Rijksbaron continued in the direction he
was going in the introduction, a much clearer dichotomy would have
presented itself: the historic present of the messenger speech, in
which the historic presents are clustered closely together in a
passage filled with the vivid description of a single event, could be
called, say, an eyewitness present, whereas those of the other
passages, all in history, and all, in contrast to Euripides, used at
turning-points in the story to signal a new stage in the narrative,
could be called a punctuating present or, for that matter, the
historic present proper."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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