From: Wayne Leman (wleman@mcn.net)
Date: Thu Apr 27 2000 - 16:26:10 EDT
<x-charset iso-8859-1>Clay responded:
>
>S.E. Porter (Idioms 2nd ed. 1994, p. 303) in his chapter on discourse
>analysis states:
>
>"Several chapters above have drawn attention to the fact that in Greek
there
>is unmarked and marked word order and clause structure. When the marked
>order is found the interpreter is free to ask whether prominence is being
>established."
>
>***end of quote**
>
>Wayne, are you suggesting that Porter's book published in the early 90's is
>now representing the old "paradigm."
No, Clay, I'm not. I didn't even suggest that Greek doesn't have an unmarked
word order. I simply said that Greek *might* be like Cheyenne and many other
languages and not have a marked constituent order.
Perhaps S.E. Porter has, since the
>publication of this book, become enlightened and has abandoned his archaic
>notions of marked and unmarked constituent order in NT Greek. We have some
>of his students on this list all they need to do is speak up and clear the
>air for us.
The idea that some languages may simply have pragmatic marking and no
unmarked constituent order is fairly new among linguists who specialize in
this subfield which is called typological linguistics. Many linguists
resisted for a long time the notion that some languages do not have a
default constituent order; they were largely oriented toward European
languages for which word order often is syntactically determinative. It
often takes several years before the insights from one discipline find their
way into mainstream literature of another. Note that many Greek scholars
still speak of Greek tenses, when they are actually different aspects. And
you know well that many Greek scholars have had little, if any, exposure to
the recent insights in Greek discourse studies. We all need to be humble and
patient as we work at inter-disciplinary cross-pollination. Again, I, for
one, do not know if Greek has an unmarked constituent order. I am only
raising the possibility that it does not, since we know from
cross-linguistic studies that it has sometimes been an exercise in futility
to try to determine an unmarked word order for *some* languages, namely,
those languages which are "non-configurational."
I would love to see some of the best linguists and best Greek scholars
listening well to each other at inter-disciplinary conferences, learning
from each other. It has happened some, but we need much more of it. Dr.
David Alan Black is one Greek teacher who has spent some quality time among
linguists. Out of that time came his book Linguistics For Students of New
Testament Greek. A few other books on Greek morphology and/or syntax have
started to appear which reflect the insights of recent linguistic study.
BTW, the need is bi-directional: I know well that many of my Bible
translation colleagues, most of whom have pretty decent linguistic training,
need better grounding in Koine Greek scholarship to improve the exegetical
quality of their translations.
XARIS,
Wayne
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