From: clayton stirling bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed Apr 26 2000 - 16:20:35 EDT
I have been rereading Randall Buth's article* and mulling over this issue of
"fronting" in NT Greek. If we are going to make use of this notion of
fronting in discourse analysis of NT Greek we need to first of all settle
the issue of the base (default) constituent order for Hellenistic Greek.
Note that S.E. Porter (Idioms, 2nd ed. 1994) takes issue with the idea that
NT Greek is a VSO language.
Randall Buth in his excellent article* uses what he and others consider a
language universal pragmatic slot (p-position is Buth's term) as a means to
establish the base word order in Biblical Hebrew. What I am wondering is,
can we use the same sort of logic employed in Buth's article and apply it to
the analysis of base NT Greek constituent order?
The way one would go about this is to see if we can find patterns in NT
Greek where the pragmatic marker (P) precedes a SVO pattern. Then we need to
see if the P+SVO pattern is predominate or if P+VSO, P+VO, P+V are the
predominate patterns. To understand some of the complexity involved in this
kind of analysis one only needs to read Porter's (Idioms, 2nd ed. 1994)
chapter on word order as well as Buth's article*.
I have not seen any treatment of NT Greek constituent order which approaches
the problem the way Randall Buth does Hebrew constituent order. However, I
don't subscribe to the journals so there may be something out there which I
have not noticed.
It seems that we need to have some consensus about base NT Greek constituent
order before we can proceed to employ the notion of fronting, otherwise we
will end up in a continuos argument about preliminary assumptions and never
progress to the topic of discourse structure.
--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062
*"Functional Grammar, Hebrew and Aramaic: An integrated, Textlinguistic
Approach to Syntax (page 77ff, Bodine, W. R., ed. Discourse Analysis of
Biblical Literature: What it is and What it Offers. Atlanta: Scholars,
1995).
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