ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ

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.

There are a variety of reasons why the English Perfect and the Greek Perfect must be distinguished in spite of their shared name and similarities.

Greek students are generally taught to use their intuition in terms of deciding whether to translate a Greek perfect with an English perfect or with an English present. But rarely (ever?) is there any discussion of how these two grammatical forms differ in their usage in a cross-linguistic sense. That is, the English Perfect can be used in the context X where the Greek Perfect would be infelicitous or ungrammatical.

Well today, I’m going to give you at least one way that I found about two weeks ago (I had to search for it to find it again). This assumes that the Greek of Joshua is relatively close enough to natural Greek that this is a valid usage. I haven’t had time to check other texts.

Joshua 13:8: ταῖς δὲ δύο φυλαῖς καὶ τῷ ἡμίσει φυλῆς Μανασση, τῷ Ρουβην καὶ τῷ Γαδ, ἔδωκεν Μωυσῆς ἐν τῷ πέραν τοῦ Ιορδάνου κατ̓ ἀνατολὰς ἡλίου, δέδωκεν αὐτὴν Μωυσῆς ὁ παῖς κυρίου…
But to the two tribes and the half tribe of Manasseh, Reuben and Gad, Moses gave (an inheritance to them) in the land beyond the Jordan eastward. Moses the servant of the Lord gave them …

From there, it goes on to list the lands they received. What’s striking about this. Well for one, we see the Perfect’s move toward the Aorist, but we also see a significant way in which the Greek Perfect is very, very different from the English Perfect.

Moses is dead. Moses was dead when the book was written and Moses was dead when the events described here in chapter 13 transpired (assuming for the sake of argument they did – this is a linguistics blog not a history blog). The English perfect cannot be used with a subject the speaker knows to be deceased. The sentence:

*Moses the Lord’s servant gave them X.

is not felicitous in English.

And that, my friends, is one way in which the Greek and English Perfects are different. This sort of example is relatively easy to recognize intuitively when dong translation, but it is still helpful to recognize and understand the reason why you’ve used the English past perfective verb “gave” instead of the perfect. And that’s what I’m interested in here. The why of things.

UPDATE:

There is a pragmatic felicity condition on the use of the perfect: the subject of a Perfect sentence must be in a position to receive the participant property. Perfect sentences are infelicitous when this is not met. In the following well-known example the person referred to by the subject NP is not alive at the RT [Reference Time]. Consider (20), uttered in 1989.

(20) Einstein has lived in Princeton.

This sentence is grammatical but infelicitous when uttered at a time after the death of Eisten (Jespersen 1931:60), Chomsky (1970:85). We explain this in terms of the participant property. Einstein cannot bear the participant property in 1989, the time of the utterance of (20), and so it is pragmatically impossible to ascribe it to him. this is the force of the example. The felicity requirement, then, is reoughly as in (21):

(21) Felicity condition for the present Perfect
The person to which the subject nounphrase [sic] refers must be pragmatically able to bear the property ascribed to them.

The notion of ‘Current Relevant’ is sometimes invoked to explain the infelicity of sentences like this. (Jesphersen 1931: 47, 57, et seq; McCoard 1978, ch. 2).

Carlota Smith, The Parameter of Aspect (2nd ed.; Studies in Linguistics & Philosphy 43; Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1997), 108.

Also, I should note that an English Past Perfect, which is traditionally associated with the Greek Pluperfect would also be acceptable here: Moses had given…

Today is a day that I have been waiting for quite some time:

LOGOS 4

Over the past few months, Logos has been kind enough to allow me to participate in the private beta testing of their (formerly) forthcoming version of their library system.

And let me tell you, it has been exciting.

The new version changes just about everything. And it’s for the good.

• The new interface is clean and simple.
• Window management has been completely revolutionized.
• Library management is less time consuming & more feature rich.
• New language tools have been developed & old ones have been redesigned.
• New resources & new library collections have been released with new content — including several resources that make me less interested in investing in another piece of software (e.g. my own collection now has Swete’s The Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint including the apparatus).

Interface & Window Management:

The basic interface now consists of three basic icons & three drop down menus in the top left corner:

“Home”, “Library”, & “Search” – all of which are rather self-explanatory. And “File” consists have various syntax searches, notes, visual filters, clippings, etc. that you might create as you go along. Under “Guides” we have the ever reliable passage guide, exegetical guide, & word study guide. All of which have received a nice face lift;

Organizing Windows has improved in some incredible ways. For one, it’s now possible to simple drag windows around and they resize to a highlighted area:

But probably the most exciting thing is the fact that now windows can be separated from the central program window:

Which then results in:

This definitely makes Logos 4 much easier to work with when using multiple programs at the same time compared to Logos 3 – or using multiple monitors (which I would love to have, but don’t).

Finally, had you set up your windows in a certain way a week ago that you want to go back to? Didn’t save it? Can’t remember exactly what it was? Well, Layouts has changed all of that:

There’s a reason though. Anyway, it is now possible go back and pick out a particular layout that you had used a few days before, rename it, and save it as your own. Currently, I have four such layouts. Why two Layouts with virtually the same name? Well, it’s a long story.

The Library

With Version 4, we can now both tag and rate the books in our libraries. Note that haven’t spent too much time ranking books –- Swanson’s dictionary is gets two stars. That’s not because it’s bad, just that it’s not what I would want. It’s a great dictionary for a quick gloss, but I’m very, very rarely interested in a quick gloss. Just want to put a plug in here for the slow, detail reading of lexical entries of full-fledged lexicons like BDAG, LSJ, GELS, & L&N. It gets two stars instead of one because it’s still far superior than Strongs.

Ah, but now we come to the interesting stuff in the library: new resources. Now what follows, as I understand it minimally requires the Original Languages Library, though you will need to go look at Logos’ website to double check on that. And you may have noticed it in a screen shot above:

We finally have something to compete with (and absolutely crush!) Opentext.org’s database. These are the same trees that Andi Wu & Randall Tan discussed at International SBL this past year, as well as at BibleTech:2009 (where there’s also a PDF & mp3 available for download).

It’s doesn’t do everything. But it’s a massive leap in the right direction. For one, unlike Opentext.org, Cascadia actually recognizes that there are more than four types of constituents (Predicate, Subject, Complement, & Adjunct). Unfortunately, the treatment of discontinuous phrases is just about the same and needs work. But Cascadia brings a lot to the table:

• Actual Phrase Structure
• More Clause Types – the inclusion of “Verb Elided Clause” as a clause type is incredibly important – especially for Paul.
• Recognition that, semantically speaking, copulas (e.g. εἰμί) are not predicates.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Now I’ve only been able to search using this new database for about a month now, but I definitely like what I have seen, generally speaking. More than anything, I’ve appreciated being able to do the same search using both Cascadia and Opentext.org together and compare the search results.

For example, ditransitive clauses have had my curiosity off and on for some time now, so I constructed this search in Cascadia using the new and improved Syntax Search Dialog (It’s similar to the old one, but now you can drag and drop, which makes it easier to use and is so cool):

And essentially the same search in Opentext.org:

The results were rather interesting. Opentext received more hits:

The first two in Matthew aren’t ditransitive in Cascadia because they both use copulas. Thus, it is the initial adjective that receives the Predicate Function rather than the verb. An adjective cannot be an Object if it is the semantic predicate of the clause.

Acts 2:39 is not ditransitive in Cascadia because Opentext.org has incorrectly annotated ἂν as a Complement, which it very much is not. And Acts 25:27 has the rather semantically empty, δοκέω, and thus the semantic predicate of the clause is ἄλογον.

Finally, 2 Corinthians 9:1 is not ditransitive in Cascadia, again, because the verb of the clause is a copula.

So why did I go through all of this?

Well, for one, we finally have a second voice beside Opentext.org that provides an extremely beneficial balance & check for determining what the syntax of the text actually is. Of the five differences in this search, four of the were the result of Opentext.org’s simplicity (which, granted, at times is a good thing). But this search also revealed a tagging mistake in Opentext as well. Doing quality research is always going to be dependent upon the quality of the data we use. And now we have a significantly easier way to confirming what is the accurate syntactic annotation.

There is more to do in Greek syntax, of course, but I’ll leave that for another time. I’m planning on putting in another proposal to BibleTech:2010 on this very topic.

I’ll leave you with this: the preface from the Cascadia graphs, just to give you an idea of where they came from:

The Cascadia Syntax Graphs of the New Testament is derived from a new dynamic treebank project developed by the Asia Bible Society. The Greek Syntactic Treebank Project is built on the basis of a computer-readable Greek grammar, with the syntactic trees (graphs) directly generated by a parser. Manual checking and corrections are stored as data in a knowledge base to guide the parser. The syntax trees (graphs) are dynamically generated from the latest version of the grammar and knowledge base, which enables continual organic improvement and growth as the grammar and knowledge base are maintained and updated.

We humbly present this preliminary version of the syntax graphs to users of Logos version 4 and look forward to improving and expanding it in the future.

Randall Tan
Andi Wu
November, 2009

Andi Wu and Randall K. Tan, Cascadia Syntax Graphs of the New Testament (Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009).

There is much, much more to say, but I hope I’ve at least given you something to whet your appetite for the time being. Logos 4 is good enough that It’ll be replacing Logos 3 for me. Most definitely.

By the way, did I mention that as of version 4, my entire library is now indexed (which times some time, but is definitely worth it) and I can search my 2000 books in mere seconds for anything?

The Mac version of Logos 4 is in Alpha testing as we speak and will be have complete parity with the Windows version. That’s right, Mac users, you haven’t been ignored.

And did I mention at all Logos 4 for iPhone & iPod Touch is part of the deal?

Be sure to head over to LOGOS 4 to get the whole scoop and learn about new notes, clippings, handouts, editable passage, exegetical, & word study guides (or you can now create your own!). There’s so much that I could have shared, but I wanted to focus on the things that matter to me. So go, check it out: LOGOS 4.

Notes:

• All screenshots are illustrative. Resources shown may not be included in Logos 4 base packages – i.e. you need at least the Original Languages Library for either Opentext.org or Cascadia.
• Upgrade discounts are available for existing customers.

Other Reviews thus far:

Ricoblog,

Reuben Gomez

Steve Runge’s got a bit too.

Joe Miller

Thomas Black

Adam Couturier

Robert Pavich

Ken Morris

Chris Roberts

John Benjamins is kind of like the Brill of the linguistics world — yes, Brill also publishes linguistics. I’m just making the comparison because most people familiar with Biblical Studies are more likely to recognize Brill’s name than John Benjamin’s. In any case, the two publishers are similar in that they’re both situated in the Netherlands and book chiefly sell their books to libraries.

But I just discovers something that’s rather incredible about JB:

You can browse all their books online for free: HERE.

They provide a internet browser plugin and you can read their books online to your heart’s content!

Now this is relevant to you, the reader’s of my blog, because that oh, so expensive book that I’ve talked about from time to time, On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases. The expression of semantic roles in Ancient Greek is published by JB — and thus, also available through JB’s Ebrary (again, HERE).

JB requires an account if you want to print or copy from their books — and that is what they’ll charge for. I haven’t yet found pricing for copying and printing, but I’m sure it’s there somewhere. Still, this is very exciting to me.

Go check out this great Greek book.

For some time I’ve been rather surprised by how many people struggle to understand exactly what Aspect is.

Granted it took me looking at Aspect in three different languages before it really clicked, but it seems so obvious now, after the fact. Part of me wonders if they emphasis on Aspect with relation to discourse analysis that some have proposed is part of the problem: that is, students (and profs?) are having this idea of aspect and discourse prominence thrown at them at the same time as they struggle to understand what Aspect.

Another part of the problem is the different terminology used by different Greek grammars. Mounce’s grammar in particular definitely does not help students when they come to discussions in other texts. His terminology maybe closer to traditional English school grammar teaching, but it’s not going to help when you move to other books.

And so I’m curious. How well do you feel you understand what Aspect is?

update: it appears that all polldaddy polls are down right now. hopefully this will be fixed. Please come back and vote later, I’d appreciate it — or leave a comment here!

Dan Wallace has posted a very short essay that simply surveys the major interpretive landscape of 1 Timothy 2:12. He doesn’t give much in terms of conclusions about what his view is. In general that’s very helpful considering that most discussions of this verse are so emotionally charged toward one perspective that it can be hard for people to understand exactly how many complex and unsure issues there are.

And by the way, I can think of probably another half dozen that didn’t make his list.

Interpretive Issues in 1 Timothy 2:12

So I’ve been working through a relatively recent (2008) article on Aspect in Revelation 5, criticizing and critiquing it. And I had planned to post my comments online this weekend. The Article is David Mathewson’s “Verbal Aspect in the Apocalypse of John: An Analysis of Revelation 5″ (NovT 50 [2008]: 58-77), which I only found via Café Apocalypsis’ recent post praising the article: Mathewson on Verbal Aspect and Revelation 5. I have far less praise. In fact, I would say that Mathewson has thoroughly failed in his article. He’s too dependent on Porter & Porter’s absolutely incredibly misreading of the literature (see my posts HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, & HERE <— in chronological order).

The article is currently available via Ingenta (though the PDF for the article is listed under the title for the following one): HERE.

But as I was reading through it once more this afternoon, I realized that Mathewson’s thesis is, in of itself, circular.

But before I show you this particular sentence, you need to remember a few points:

1. Mathewson accepts Porter’s claim that Greek verbs don’t have tense – i.e. verbs only express aspect (page 61).
2. Mathewson continues to use the word “tense” to refer to the wordforms – i.e. aorist tense (Ibid). But since in his view verbs only express aspect, we basically have this bizarre situation where “tense” = aspect.

Okay, now with those two points in mind, read this sentence:

It is the contention of this analysis that verbal aspect can sufficiently explain John’s usage of the tenses in chapter 5, and that appeals to temporal values (Mussies) or underlying Semitic substrates (Lancellotti, Thompson) are unnecessary, raising the need for further application of verbal aspect to other sections of the Apocalypse (page 62).

Now aside from the fact that Mathewson appears to have strangely misrepresented Mussies (his quote of Mussies view several pages [page 59] earlier is rather odd and somewhat slanted, but we’ll deal with that in another post), let’s look at this particular quote.

Remember Mathewson takes an Verbal Aspect only approach to the Greek verb & uses “Tense” to refer to the wordforms. In light of this, let’s re-read the sentence with that explicitly shown:

It is the contention of this analysis that verbal aspect can sufficiently explain John’s usage of the [Aspectual word-forms] in chapter 5, and that appeals to temporal values (Mussies) or underlying Semitic substrates (Lancellotti, Thompson) are unnecessary, raising the need for further application of verbal aspect to other sections of the Apocalypse (page 62).

That’s right, Verbal Aspect can explain John’s use of Verbal Aspect in Revelation 5!

It’s Perfect!! Why didn’t anyone think of this before???

In my next post, which because of this one will be delayed, we’ll deal more in depth with the theoretical underpinning’s Mathewson’s article, which I will show to be thoroughly flawed because of his dependence upon Porter & his minons.

As for the body of the article itself, well, it’s actually just fine even with the theoretical problems. And more importantly, it fits well with Mussies’ analysis which really has very little to do with tense and much more do to with genre (I haven’t read Thompson or Lancellotti, so I can’t speak for them).

It seems that the former is far, far more popular than the latter.

But I enjoy writing about the latter much more.

Sigh…

On my last post, Carl made an insightful comment — one that  I’ve had myself, though not as well put — about this collection from Logos:

Biblical Languages: Reference Grammars and Introductions (19 Vols.)

He wrote,

Frankly, that’s an absurdly large collection; I can see putting it in a package with other reference works that are really Classical: Allen & Greenough, the Homeric grammar, and the like. But very few specialists are going to want that whole bundle.

There are some great books in the collection, but he’s right. It’s way too diverse. It would be far better if it were broken up into a couple less expensive collections.

Part of me wonders if the reason for putting all these books together is so that otherwise, they would never get enough orders for the less Biblical studies related books, e.g. the Syriac, Latin, & perhaps the Homeric Grammar…

I have a feeling that is the case, though even still, I may very well still suggest breaking this collection up.

Some have called the claim that Modern Greek has something to add to the study of Hellenistic Greek controversial.

Perhaps.

But I think that depends on what you mean and what context you intend to use Modern Greek. For the first or second year student, I would heartily agree that Modern Greek isn’t going to be terribly helpful.

But when it comes to understanding the Greek text by the more advanced scholar, particularly for being able to teach the beginning student, Modern Greek is much more important.

Let’s look at an example.

According to Artemis Alexiadou, Liliane Haegeman & Melita Stavrou, the two demonstrative positions in Greek have distinctly different meanings (the footnotes are theirs):

Context A: Mary is at the butcher’s pointing to a pork joint that she wants to buy.

a. Mary: Thelo afto to butaki.
want-1SG this the joint
‘I want this pork joint.’

b. Mary: ??Thelo to butaki afto.[48]
want-1SG the joint this

Context B: A paragraph from a guide book about a Greek town.

c. I poli eci pola istorika ktiria pu xronologhunte apo ti vizantini epoci.
the town has many historical buildings that date back to the Byzantine period

d. Ta ktiria afta episceptonte kathe xrono ekatondadhes turistes.
the buildings these vistis-3SG every year hundreds tourists

e. ??? Aftra ta ktiria episcenpttonte kathe rono ekatondadhes turistes.
these the buildings visit-3SG every year hundreds tourists[49]

Manolessou & Panagiotidis (1999), Manolessou (2000), Panagiotidis (2000), and Grohmann & Panagiotidis (2005) observe that in Greek the pre-article position of the demonstrative afto entails greater deictic strength, in contrast with the post-nominal position in which the demonstrative is used as discourse anaphoric, namely to refer back to an entity that has been previously mentioned. Only the pre-article demonstrative can normally be used along with a pointing gesture: based on this observation it is generally agreed that only the pre-article demonstrative is genuinely deictic.[50]

Artemis Alexiadou, Liliane Haegeman & Melita Stavrou, The Noun Phrase in Generative Grammar (Studies in Generative Grammar 71; Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2007), 120-121.

---

[48] For some speakers (b) is acceptable with contrastive intonation on the demonstrative and an accompanying deictic gesture.

[49] Notice that the ‘strategy’ discussed in the preceding note is not available for rescuing (83e) since the buildings in question are not physically present, and so one cannot point to them (unlike the butcher’s customer who actually sees the joint).

[50] Interestingly, a different proposal with respect to the interpretation of post-nominal and pre-article demonstratives is made by Tasmowski De Ryck (1990), who argues that the pre-article demonstrative has a thematic interpretation (i.e. it represents an entity already known/given) while the post-nominal demonstrative has a rhematic (i.e. new) interpretation.

These words, sparked my curiosity as to what we can say about the status of demonstratives in Hellenistic Greek. So I perused the texts for a bit. I didn’t do anything comprehensive, just perusing. But what I saw, in my randomness, fit – if we assume that footnote 48 was generally true for the Hellenistic Period.

Likewise, it *appears* that pre-nominal demonstratives are not allowed in situations like what we see in Context B above. Granted, this was more difficult to test. What I did was search through the non-narrative texts of the New Testament and examined the kinds of contexts and pragmatic situations where the author used pre-nominal vs. post-nominal demonstratives. The different, I though, was quite striking. For example, in Paul, pre-nominal demonstratives are only used in a couple different situations:

1. Pronominal situations: Rom 11:30, νῦν δὲ ἠλεήθητε τῇ τούτων ἀπειθείᾳ, “but now you have received mercy as a result of their disobedience.”
2. Quotes from Direct Speech: 1 Cor 11:25, τοῦτο τὸ ποτήριον ἡ καινὴ διαθήκη ἐστὶν ἐν τῷ ἐμῷ αἵματι, this cup is the new covenant in my blood.”
3. References to previous words written (i.e. the external real life referent is the text itself): 2 Cor 7:1 ταύτας οὖν ἔχοντες τὰς ἐπαγγελίας, “Therefore, since we have these promises…” (Cf. Eph 3:1
4. Abstact Concepts that cannot have an external referent: 2 Cor 11:17, ὃ λαλῶ οὐ κατὰ κύριον λαλῶ ἀλλʼ ὡς ἐν ἀφροσύνῃ ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ ὑποστάσει τῆς καυχήσεως, “ In this self-confident boasting I am not talking as the Lord would, but as a fool.”

If what Alexiadou, Haegeman, & Stavrou say is correct for Hellenistic Greek as well, then it would have been ungrammatical for Paul to have said: ἐν τούτοις τοῖς κλίμασι instead of ἐν τοῖς κλίμασι τούτοις in Romans 15:23.

Now whether I’m right or not, I’m not sure, which is why I used the word “appears” above. I don’t think we can draw definite conclusions on the issue from this very cursory & ad hoc study I did this afternoon.

But if I am correct on this, then there are two important things to remember:

1) Greek word order issues are never discussed in beginning classes in terms of the why?. New students only learn the what?. They need to learn the reasons for different word orders.

2) What I just covered here is something you could very easily teach to your students: “Students, this is why the order of the demonstrative in the NP matters and this is what it means.” See, that was simple, wasn’t it?