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

Dr. Don Wilkins drdwilkins at verizon.net
Thu Mar 25 19:14:10 EDT 2010


On Mar 25, 2010, at 3:15 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:

>
> 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.

I am saying that the obligations and requirements (as I understand  
them) incumbent upon NT linguists to be competent in their own  
profession of linguistics necessarily prevent or discourage them from  
personally reading the large corpus of extant ancient Greek or of any  
other language. For example, one very competent NT linguist I knew  
once said that she had not actually read a lot of NT Greek, and did  
not feel that she needed to. I view this as a basic difference in  
philosophy between NT linguists and Greek philologists. It might be  
helpful if you would qualify for me what you mean by a contemporary  
NT linguist. Perhaps this is someone who has read through the NT but  
has not personally read a large corpus of non-NT ancient Greek.
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
This is a good example of the basic philosophical difference I  
referred to. Not everything in a traditional grammar is necessarily  
true, but if the author is competent at the level I have been  
describing, he should be taken seriously. NT linguists IMO tend to  
ignore the traditional grammarian's credentials and experience, and  
worse, their challenges tend not to confront the substance of the  
issue as understood by those who are experts in Greek. Regrettably I  
did not see the thread on the GA, so I can't say much about it. My  
own experience with the GA is that the author deliberately uses the  
construction to isolate it syntactically, though it is always  
logically related to the rest of the sentence. Elizabeth, if you have  
the time and inclination, perhaps you could email me off-list a list  
of references for the GA's supposedly linked syntactically (I don't  
have access to Young's Grammar). I think I know what you and Young  
are talking about, but I can't be sure otherwise. There may be some  
syntactical overlaps, but in my view a grammar would not do a good  
job of explaining the GA if it failed to point out that the author  
means to isolate the construction by using the genitive noun and  
participle. Of course no grammar is perfect (Smyth certainly comes  
close) or perfectly written. Linguists perhaps deserve to be  
admonished as to their own stylistics; they seem to expect the  
average student to learn their terminology before the actual content  
can be understood.

Don Wilkins



More information about the B-Greek mailing list