From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 29 1999 - 07:25:28 EDT
At 6:29 AM -0400 6/29/99, Moon-Ryul Jung wrote:
>>> KAI ANABLEYAS ELEGEN, BLEPW TOUS ANQRWPOUS hOTI hWS DENDRA hORW
>>>PERIPATOUNTAS.
>
>[Carl]
>The way I
>would express the usage now in question is that hOTI does mean
>fundamentally, "the fact being that ..." and that the causal hOTI is the
>most common usage of this hOTI.
>
>[Moon]
>Is GAR interchangeable with hOTI in many cases?
>
>[Carl]
>I wouldn't want to say so; it seems to me that a hOTI clause tends more to
>clarify an assertion that is a bit vague, while a GAR clause explains WHY
>a
>previous assertion is valid.
>
>---------
>Carl, a hOTI clause can be used to state a reasons for the previous
>assertion. As you said, the causal hOTI is the most common usage
>of the hOTI as "the fact being that ...". We may say that
>the relationship between two clauses connected by GAR is
>"conclusion-ground". Do we have to say that the relationship between two
>clauses
>connected by hOTI is primarily "assertion-clarification", even when
>the relationship seems causal?
Moon, I think you're trying to cut the distinctions here a bit more sharply
than actual lexical usage permits. The only way I think I can respond is by
analogy. Participles in a predicate position with relation to their
referent substantive may be understood in more than one possible way,
although more often than not the context is sufficiently helpful that we
can judiciously determine what is most probably intended:
POLLOI MEN EDRAMON EN AGWNI, EKEINOU DE TACEWS TRECONTOS OUK EDUNAMEQA
DIEIDENAI TO PROSWPON. "Several ran in the race, but we could not
make out the face of that (man since/when/although) he was running
swiftly." Here we would opt, I think for "since he was running swiftly"
because the context suggests our inability to distinguish the face resulted
from the fact that it wasn't stationary. But alternatively we could have
translated the participle indifferently as "the fact being that he was
running quickly." And in fact we could have had a hOTI of the sort we are
talking about in the clause thus: EKEINOU DE OUK EDUNAMEQA DIEIDENAI TO
PROSWPON hOTI TACEWS TRECONTOS.
I really think what I'm trying to say here is that the CAUSAL
interpretation of a hOTI is a subclassification of the
"assertion-clarification" function of the hOTI--and that the CAUSAL
function is the one we see most frequently. But there is a principle
involved here that is, I think important: many of our grammatical
distinctions of category are based upon our need to convey the sense of a
foreign language into a target language, and our distinctions are based
upon the requisites of the target language; it is a mistake to assume that
these distinctions are necessarily grammatically or logically present in
the original language.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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