From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 28 2001 - 11:27:31 EST
Moon, Iver, and any others seriously interested in this question:
I'm sorry about the delay of a further response on my part on this
interesting and not unimportant issue. I've been keeping very busy this
month teaching an intensive Greek course. As I've already indicated, I
think it is very important pedagogically.
At 8:49 PM -0500 1/22/01, Moon-Ryul Jung wrote:
>So, the crude taxomony of positions (to be used pedagogically at least) I
>would like to suggest is:
>
>Predicative Position - the position of adjectives, nouns, and adverbials
> used as predicates in sentences.
>Restrictive Position - the position of adjectives, nouns, and adverbials
> used as modifiers in noun phrase.
> - Attributive Position - the position of descriptive adjectives, nouns,and
> adverbials, i.e. within the article-noun configuration.
> - Quantitative Positionn - the position of demonstratives and
> quantifiers, i.e. outside of the article-noun configuration.
Moon picked up on one of my "hunches" about what is traditionally called
"predicate" position and the placement of demonstrative pronouns there: I
said that it's as if the demonstrative pronoun were somehow a predicate in
itself. even in a sentence with a regular predicate:
EKEINOS hO ANHR: here we might be willing to call this a simple
noun phrase (if you don't mind, I'll spell that out, since I tend to be
uncomfortable with turning grammatical language into algebraic expressions
and I also don't think it makes what we say about grammar more intelligible
to call an unknown quantity by the name of an unintelligible theta); and
yet it certainly CAN be a sentence in its own right: "The fellow is
yonder." But suppose we write, EKEINOS hO ANHR QAUMASTOS! Whereas in
ordinary English we'd say, "That fellow is marvelous!", yet I think that
the way the EKEINOS item functions makes this essentially: "The fellow
(he's over yonder) is marvelous!" Although I can't offhand think of an
example like this from the GNT, it's not altogether uncommon in earlier
Attic to have: TACUS PARESTAI hO BASILEUS, "The king will arrive quickly."
Here TACUS is used adverbially: it agrees in number, gender, and case with
hO BASILEUS, but it is construed with the verb PARESTAI.
It seems to me that the demonstratives hOUTOS, EKEINOS, and hODE,
PAS when it means "all", MONOS when it means "by oneself" adverbially,
AUTOS when it is intensive and means "himself/herself/itself" adverbially,
MESOS when it means "in the middle" adverbially, AKROS when it means "at
the extremity" adverbially all function as part of the predicate--and that
is why traditionally they have been said to be in the "predicate" position
in relationship to the article, but it seems to me that we might
conceivably call this instead the 'ADVERBIAL' position relative to the
article and perhaps be more precisely descriptive in terminology. On the
other hand, when any adjective or demonstrative FOLLOWS upon the article in
what we have traditionally called the "attributive" position, they do
essentially describe or characterize the noun, and when PAS, AKROS, MONOS,
MESOS, or AUTOS are in this position, they have different semantic
functions from those they had in the "predicate" or "adverbial" position:
hH AKRH POLIS originally meant "the high citadel"; hH MESH POLIS meant "the
central city"; hO MONOS ALHQINOS QEOS = "the only true God"; hO AUTOS ANHR
= "the same man"; hH PASA OIKIA = "the entire household." Could we not use
the term 'ADNOMINAL' for adjectives (or other phrases, adverbs, etc.) in
that position relative to the article? or actually, I see nothing
misleading about the traditional term 'ATTRIBUTIVE' in this case. The
problem of terminology seems more to lie in the supposedly misleading
phrase "predicate position" for modifiers of a substantive outside of the
article-substantive phrase.
I don't know whether this is something worth considering at the
same time or not, but I suspect it's part of the distinctive character of
Greek, even if there are other languages that have a similar sort of
article. The Greek article is in origin a weak demonstrative, was quite
commonly used as such in Homeric narrative, and is even used as such to
refer to previously-named figures in Koine Greek in new clauses, e.g. hO DE
APOKRIQEIS EIPEN: "But he answered and said ..." or hOI D' AKOUSANTES
EPANHLQON: "And when they heard it, they returned." It has been argued and
may very well be true that the usage of an article with a noun always
implicitly involves the participle of the verb "be" such that an ordinary
phrase such as hO BASILEUS is really implicitly hO WN BASILEUS and means
"the one being (= who is) king." This fits also the ordinary usage of
EKEINOS hO BASILEUS, no matter what terminology we use for the position of
EKEINOS relative to the article in this expression: EKEINOS is the
substantive, while hO BASILEUS is characterizing EKEINOS attributively:
"that one, i.e. the one (being = who is) king."
I guess, then, that what I'm suggesting herewith is that, if we feel a need
to alter the traditional terminology, we might do well to refer to what has
been traditionally called "predicate position" as "adverbial position"; as
for "attributive position" we could either keep that or substitute for it
"adnominal position." At the same time it should be remembered that this
terminology is always to be used with reference to position relative to the
article and that we are using it for pedagogical purposes--in order to
clarify how some aspects of a language with a relatively free word-order
can rearrange elements with significant changes in semantic function.
I rather doubt that such a change in terminology would find wide
acceptance. I rather suspect that most people would agree with the maxim,
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it"--and most people are probably not
convinced that the traditional terminological distinction of "predicate"
and "attributive" positions is really "broke." Of course these are the same
people whom I hope somehow to convince to stop using terms like "deponent"
or referring to -QH- forms as "passive" rather than "middle/passive." At
any rate, I'm suggesting that perhaps "adverbial position relative to the
article" might replace "predicate position relative to the article" in our
descriptive terminology.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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