From: Mark Wilson (emory2oo2@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 10:40:27 EST
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Moon:
You wrote:
-----------
>But I happened to read the following book review. Here the author of the
>book
>seems to claim that the classical Greek word order is as follows:
>
>[T][F] V X.
>
>Here T= topic, F=focus, V=verb, X=everything else.
>T and F are optional. Topic=the things about which the sentence
>talks about. Focus=the new information that the sentence tries to
>introduce or confirm.
------------
It seems to me that this line of reasoning, namely, "generally adhered to
word order by writers of Hellenistic Greek," carries with it an inherent
problem.
It was noted earlier that word order of Hellenistic Greek can not be
falsifiable (as far as "for emphasis") and therefore can not "officially"
assert itself as true, and now I have a question related to Dr. Dik's
proposed theory that is not dissimilar from the above criticism:
How can we determine if an author, who for emphasis, reverses the [T] and
[F]? Is there any way to distinguish between the "normal" [T] [F] for an
emphasized [F] in the construct [F] [T]?
Let me be quick to add that I believe that Linguistics has helped me
understand Greek, especially Dr. Olsen's book, but I think there are
SPECIFIC LINGUISTIC PRINCIPLES that hold true in Hellenistic Greek itself,
but have a hard time seeing how GENERAL LINGUISTIC PRINCIPLES can teach us
such specific nuances as word order/emphasis in one language.
Thank you,
Mark Wilson
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