[B-Greek] 2COR. 11:1 MOU & AFROSUNHS

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Mon Jan 4 23:03:28 EST 2010


On Jan 4, 2010, at 2:37 PM, Steve Runge wrote:

> I do not think there is much hay to be made about AFROSUNHS since it  
> is in its expected position.


Thank you Steve,

I agree, not much hay to be made here. Nothing noteworthy about the  
position of AFROSUNHS. I wonder if "markedness" is understood in  
exactly the same way by all the players in the linguistic word game.  
Sometimes I get the impression it is not used in the manner you have  
defined it to indicate something abnormal, that is contrary to some  
established pattern. For example a constituent could be marked as the  
topic of a topic focus construction by having a morpheme attached to  
it or by occupying the topic slot in the clause. This sense of marking  
doesn't imply abnormal.

It seems to me that determining what is and what is not a marked word  
order in ancient Greek is a somewhat complex[1] project. There are so  
many reasons why some speaker/author might use one or another word  
order.  Claiming there is a default position for some constituent  
(e.g. finite/main verb) is certainly going to meet with lots of  
objections. The notion that a clause final verb is somehow "marked"  
seems to make some sense if markedness is simply a matter of  
statistics. But attaching some sort of meaning to this clause final  
position is a much more ambitious project than simply saying it is  
statistically abnormal.

Elizabeth Kline

[1] complex is used here as a euphamism for dubious.





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