[B-Greek] Reverse Assimilation to the Relative (was Assimilation of the Relative.)

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Wed Dec 16 11:54:16 EST 2009


On Dec 15, 2009, at 1:56 PM, yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net wrote:

> I appreciate Elizabeth's suggestion about terminology on attraction.  
> I'm not going to get in a wad about the classicist relative case  
> "attraction" (what Elizabeth and others suggest might better be  
> called assimilation) as a tag for describing the change of relative  
> pronoun morphology of the case appropriate to its function in the  
> embedded sentence (r-case, or relative clause case) to the  
> morphology of case drawn from the matrix sentence in which it is  
> embedded (m-case, or matrix case).

Than you Yancy,

The issue in my mind isn't one of choosing between alternative terms  
attraction or assimilation, BDF and ATR use both terms. What I am  
concerned about is comparable to the contrast between glosses and  
definitions in the lexicon e.g., BAGD and BDAG. When it comes to  
assimilation of case in the relative pronoun the NT grammars do not  
offer very much beyond glossing. The attempts at explanation, if there  
are any, fall short of what a linguist would expect to see. ATR p711  
is quite similar to G.Cooper "The assimilation is at bottom the same  
that we see in other adjectives ..."   "The assimilation of the  
relative ... may be compared to the assimilation in the  
adjective ...". However, ATR doesn't develop this idea, he proceeds to  
give examples of the various types of relative pronoun  assimilation,  
leaving the explanation of the syntax quite vague. That is the problem  
IMO, a mere catalog of examples, the what questions are addressed but  
the why questions are not addressed adequately.


Elizabeth Kline







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