Semantics, Pragmatics & Pronouns
Steve wrote the post that I seriously considered writing last night when I first saw Mounce’s post on emphatic pronouns (Sunday: HERE; Monday: HERE — though it’s the same post in both cases).
I’ll say up front that Steve is completely right on this one. To begin with, even the very concept of the “emphatic pronoun” is so frustratingly nebulous so as to provide no basis for determining what is and what isn’t an emphatic one.
Steve has already done an excellent job dealing with the question of whether of pronoun is or isn’t “emphatic,” showing that it is often the case that a pronoun merely provides a “frame of reference” for the speaker’s audience. So I’ll deal with a different issue: the idea that this usage of the pronoun as either providing a frame of reference or being marked for Focus/emphasis is a result of the fact that the verb carries enough information by itself to mark the Subject of the clause.
The existence of the pronoun by itself with an agreement marking verb means very little — whether in Greek or in any other language. There are languages where there is absolutely no agreement marking on the verb at all. Chinese is a good example of this.
Mandarin Chinese (as well as other related languages) do not possess any sort of subject agreement markings on its verb at all. And yet, Mandarin is also highly driven by pragmatics, so much so that once a topic is established, that element is does not need to be referred to again. When we combine this with the fact that the verbs don’t mark the subject at all, we find a situation where early non-native speakers (especially whose first language is English) can barely follow a conversation. All of the active referents in the discourse have all dropped out and they have nothing to follow.
All this to say that both Koine Greek and Mandarin Chinese have similar pragmatic systems which regularly drop pronouns from the sentences and only add them for specific pragmatic reasons. And yet, in Greek we have verbal agreement morphology and in Mandarin, we do not. This isn’t to say that the verbal morphology cannot be the cause of Greek’s pragmatics. It simply means that there is really no way of knowing the origin of pronoun drop in Greek at all. It might be the verb’s subject agreement. It might not be.
Bibliography:
LaPolla, Randy J. Grammatical Relations in Chinese: Synchronic and Diachronic Considerations. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1990.
“Inflection.” Wikipedia. Cited 12/14/2009.
Greek Word Order Disseration
Rich Rhodes mentioned it in a recent post over at Better Bibles and then today, one of my blog readers e-mailed me an online link to it:
Thetic Constructions in Koine Greek: εἰμί ‘be’, γίνομαι ‘occur’, ἔρχομαι ‘come’, ἰδού/ἴδε ‘behold’, and complement clauses of ὁράω ‘see’ by N. A. Bailey.
The dissertation is currently available Here.
I’ve read chapter one and part of chapter 2. Those are the introduction and the literature survey, respectively. What I’ve seen thus far looks fantastic. Rich was right in his commendation of this piece of work. It’s quite impressive. I’m pleased to see that 1) he’s taken Lambrecht and Levinsohn as his touch points for the study and 2) he’s confirmed my own thoughts about the models proposed by a few other recent works, including Helma Dik’s.
Translation Question
Why in the world is it a strength for a translation to be made within the Tyndale & KJV stream of tradition???
In the Mail — the “Oops” Edition
So a couple weeks ago I requested a review copy from Crossway of this book:
- Publisher: Crossway/Good News Publishers
- Author: Poythress, Vern Sheridan
- ISBN-10: 1433501791 | ISBN-13: 9781433501791
- Binding: Paperback
- List Price: $20.00
I’ve been pretty curious about this new book. I like Poythress quite a bit. Granted, I also disagree rather often, but I have a very high level of respect for him. Besides the translation & gender stuff that I’ve disagreed with, I’ve read a few of his linguistic articles and they’re been rather good.
Unfortunately, I didn’t receive this book in the mail.
“But wait,” you say, “you just need to be patient. I’ll come.”
Yeah that’s the thing. I did receive a book in the mail from cross way. Just not this one. The package arrived. The invoice listed In the Beginning was the Word on the first line, but the book was not there. No. And instead, I received this book:
Jesus Driven Ministry by Ajith Fernando
The book does look interesting. Just not for me. I’ve e-mailed Crossway and am currently waiting to hear back from them.
In the Mail
Many thanks to Brill for providing me with a copy of Stéphanie J Bakker’s The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek: A Functional Analysis of the Order and Articulation of NP Constituents in Herodotus (ASCP 15; Leiden: Brill, 2009).
I actually received it a couple weeks ago, but I’ve been too busy to post lately. I’m about half way through the book thus far and have thoroughly enjoyed it. The first half of the book is a discussion of word order within the noun phrase and the second half deals with the function of the Greek article within the noun phrase. Part II is particularly excellent and unmatched in the literature on Ancient Greek. You can expect a full two or three part review probably toward the end of December or early January.
Wow, this is a great book.
Accordance & Syntax
As someone who has a highly vested interest in syntax databases, I’m excited to hear David Lang say that Syntax databases will be coming to the next version of Accordance.
I will be giving a presentation at BibleTech: 2010 on the very subject of Syntax databases currently titled “Greek Syntax Databases: Retrospect & Prospects” in which I’ll examine, compare and critique the two currently available syntax databases: Opentext.org & Cascadia Syntax Graphs and then also (hopefully) present some of my own work on representing Greek syntax. Currently the abstract isn’t yet up, but this is a good summary. I’ve been hoping to do something like this for some time, so I’m looking forward to the conference. Much of my presentation has been brewing for at least 14 months, though very little has showed up here on my blog.
I definitely look forward to seeing what Accordance has to offer when they release their next version and may very well consider looking into getting it if I like what I see.
…and I’m always willing to do a review copy…
Random Sanskrit Post
This is definitely not about Greek, but I do know that there are readers out there who would be quite interested in this:
A COMPREHENSIVE INPUT METHOD FOR CLASSICAL SANSKRIT
It’s currently available for Mac & Windows.
So if you’ve desperately wanted to type in Sanskrit, but haven’t had the tools, now’s your chance!
Fanning at Eisenbrauns
Eisenbrauns currently has the hottest price on Fanning’s Verbal Aspect.
Greek and English Relative Clauses
Though both require relative clauses to begin with a relative pronoun, Greek and English are typologically distinct in that one employs the pronoun with the gap strategy (English) and the other only needs the pronoun (Greek): a man who Chris saw [GAP] vs. τὸ ποτήριον ὃ ἐγὼ μέλλω πίνειν (the cup that I am about to drink [no gap]).
The English Gap is implicitly necessary for our processing of the grammatical relation of relative pronouns (in this case the Object relation), whereas in Greek, grammatical relations are marked by morphology* rather than structural relations/word order.
*This is not to say that English doesn’t have some morphological marking occurring on it’s pronouns, but this morphology is not the central marker of grammatical relations. Grammatical relations are centrally marked by structural position within the clause. Hence when English speakers hear relative clauses they consciously notice the Gap position where the Object would typically appear.
