[B-Greek] The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data: An Argument for a Large Corpus Size (i.e., Reading WIdely)

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Thu Mar 25 18:15:47 EDT 2010


On Mar 25, 2010, at 2:33 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

> On Mar 25, 2010, at 2:27 PM, Dr. Don Wilkins wrote:
> 
>> Very interesting. I wonder what (if anything) this says for the  
>> conflicts between the linguistics approach to Greek and the old  
>> school. Some might say that this supports the former, but it could be  
>> argued that it actually supports the latter, i.e. those students of  
>> Greek who base their conclusions on a wider personal familiarity with  
>> the extant literature.
> 
> Show me one contemporary NT linguist who does not advocate using a Corpus beyond NT and LXX.
> 


Perhaps my previous response was bit hasty, I am not certain I understand what Don Wilkins is saying.  NT linguists are a very diverse lot but the ones I know take corpus very seriously. I actually get annoyed at times by this obsessive preoccupation with corpus studies. Wading through hundreds of examples can be tedious.

NT linguists are also prone to challenging the rules found in traditional grammars. One example is the genitive absolute which came up in a different thread today. R.J. Young (Inter.Grammar p159) suggests an alternative to the traditional approach to the genitive absolute. He points out that a very significant percentage of these constructions can be shown to be syntactically linked to the main clause. In other words the traditional "rules" for the genitive absolute don't do a good job of explaining the use of this construction in greek. 

  

Elizabeth Kline
 






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