From: Wayne Leman (wleman@mcn.net)
Date: Wed Apr 26 2000 - 23:14:31 EDT
<x-charset iso-8859-1>Clay commented:
>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.
Clay, this is what would seem logical, yet it is entirely possible that we
do not need to establish any default word order for some languages.
Linguists have been working with this idea for a number of years; the
technical term some formalist linguists use for such languages is that they
are "non-configurational". Cheyenne, the language we work with, is likely
one of these. Many Philippine languages are also. That does not mean that
constituent order is unimportant for non-configurational languages but that
constituent order does not have anything to do with syntactic roles
(subject, direct object, direct object, locatives, etc.) or semantic roles
(e.g. actor, patient, etc.). Instead, such languages typically use
constituent order (or, often, a degree of word order) to mark pragmatic
relations, typically focus, emphasis, contrast.
My wife wrote her M.A. thesis on Cheyenne constituent order. She tried lots
of different approaches to Cheyenne word order. Many of the traditional ways
of explaining constituent order did not work for Cheyenne, including some of
the approaches used by linguists who fully recognized that syntactic roles
were not at all relevant to Cheyenne constituent order. It turned out, after
a great deal of analysis of the statistics of the Cheyenne data that a
concept of "newsworthy" first explained what Cheyenne speakers put first
(that is, fronted) in their sentences.
It is entirely possible that there is similaryly no underlying (default)
constituent order for Hellenistic Greek, but that fronting is simply a
pragmatic function. "Fronting" is a metaphor, not an actual movement of any
constituent. It simply explains why a constituent appears at the beginning
of a Greek clause (or sentence).
Because most of us on this list cut our linguistic teeth on European
languages for which constituent order is very often (but not always)
syntactically significant, we tend to think that we need to establish a
default constituent order for any language, even if the statistical counts
and other methods attempting to establish a default order do not come up
with anything statistically significant. One needs to approach 90% or higher
percentages for constituent order patterns before we can start to suggest
that there is some kind of default constituent order. Greek seems to have
most permutations of VSO, SVO, etc. Simply having a higher percentage of one
order, but not a statistically significant percentage, does not establish
that Greek had a default word order. It may have, but then again, it may not
have. There may, instead, be something else going on more significant that
determines constituent order in the ways we typically think of word order
for languages. It may have to do more with cognitive strategies during
concept formation and how these cognitive categories are encoded
linguistically to try to communicate those categories and concepts to
others. Constituent order is a debated issue among many linguists. Many used
to think that they needed to establish some kind of default order. Today,
many no longer hold to this view. Beware..., the basic doctrines of
linguistic faith are failling one by one. We are on the slippery downhill
road toward linguistic liberalism. What's next? Some people might suggest
that verb is not the best term to describe a number of word categories in
Greek, or that a participle is partially a noun and partially a verb, with
no distinct category boundary. Yikes. I'd better stop before I become a
liberal as well.
AMHN,
Wayne
Wayne
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