From: clayton stirling bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Tue Dec 07 1999 - 23:00:14 EST
It would be entirely fair for someone to ask the question:
But Clay, how would you improve on our current grammars?
Here is a suggestion, just one of many possible approaches. To begin
with we might completely reorganized around a functional model (NO
connection with Systemic Functional Linguistics).
Let's say we start out with an abstract language model that is a complex
network of functional domains. By complex I mean that the relational
connections between the functional domains are many to many, which gives
us a network that looks a lot like Louw and Nida's semantic domain model
for lexical semantics. But instead of lexical-semantic nodes in our
network we have functional nodes which I will now try and illustrate.
Let's take the simplest possible sentence. This sentence is made up of
two entities (things) and one action. One of our entities is an "agent"
and one entity is a "patient."
So we have a structure:
agent -> action -> patient
Now our grammar would explain for us all the different ways our
particular language, say Attic Greek can realize this structure. It will
tell us all the different ways that an agent can be encoded, all the
different ways an action can be encoded, and all the different ways a
patient can be encoded. It will then tell us how the agent, action,
patient encodings can be combined into an structure yielding an
agent -> action -> patient sentence which would be acceptable to a
native speaker of this language.
The main difference between this and our current grammars is that it is
not organized around the so called "parts of speech" but starts at the
beginning with a functional model and applies it throughout the
presentation of the material.
With this approach the genitive case and an adjective would be found
listed under the same functional domain when they both were being used
to limit a substantive. The genitive case would also appear under other
functional domains since it has a number of potential functions.
The one big advantage to this model would be that students would not be
tempted to think that the there are 36 (of 54 or 102) different kinds of
genitives. This approach would completely disabuse the student of that
awkward notion. The student would be encouraged to understand the
genitive as just one of the possible ways to realize a particular
function.
Anyway,
This is just a stab at a complex problem. Not intended to be a well
thought out solution.
Clay
-- Clayton Stirling Bartholomew Three Tree Point P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062--- B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-329W@franklin.oit.unc.edu To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
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