Stephen Carlson wrote:Yeah, Janse's proposal is where we're not quite at agreement, but I haven't read his full treatment. I'm not sure what evidence exists for a placement of the sentence accent at any location other than the first word of an intonation unit. Thus, my understanding is that the only way to get a post-verbal narrow focus is by topicalizing or at least preposing the verb into its own intonation unit.
Ordinarily, if the narrow focus is on 'son', I would expect it to be pre-verbal, like this: καὶ ἡ γυνή σου Ἐλισάβετ, υἱόν σοι γεννήσει, κτλ.
Ordinarily, yes.
This conversation, reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend of mine about Russian word order and intonation. The standard view is that languages that have variable word order--i.e. ordered by pragmatics, rather than grammatical relations--should have a relatively fixed and predictable sentence accent (normally pre-verbal), and thus in Russian there should only be a pre-verbal sentence accent that aligns with either a contrastive topic or a preposed focal constituent. She was extremely surprised to find that in
a thesis on Russian word order that while the native speaker data did, indeed,
tend toward a pre-verbal accent, it was entirely possible (and perfectly natural) for the accent to appear post-verbally under certain circumstances.
I would take clauses such as Acts 24:14 as definitive on this point for Greek:
ὁμολογῶ δὲ τοῦτό σοι ὅτι ...
Independently of the position of the enclitic pronoun, the forward pointing nature of the demonstrative necessitates a narrow focus reading of the clause. The position of the enclitic pronoun fits perfectly with this on my approach,
as I've said before...
I'm still looking for a publication venue for my research on this, but that's been difficult with something so technical, though I've recently found a good possibility and am talking with an editor right now.