From: c stirling bartholomew (cc.constantine@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed Jul 25 2001 - 20:50:40 EDT
on 7/25/01 1:16 PM, Mike Sangrey wrote:
> OK. So we allow for clauses within clauses. A complex...ummmm...
> "sentence" then can be thought of as a single clause with two clauses
> embedded within it. Conceptually, I can handle that. However, are
> you then saying that the entire letter to the Ephesians is a single
> clause with clauses within clauses within...?
>
> I would think the model would need to introduce some sense of
> disjunction between clauses, not?
>
> Or are you saying a discourse is a stream of clauses connected--
> in a semantic sense--more or less strongly, depending on various
> factors?
>
> Or are you saying something else?
Mike,
What I am saying is that all the king's linguists and all the king's men
could not put Humpty Dumpty (a sentence definition) back together again.
The notion of "sentence" is just another grammatical category that cannot be
nailed down with any sort of precision so why use it? Wayne Leman tried to
convince me otherwise during our last go around on this but I am still
unconvinced. I have be listening to very well informed linguists from places
like Moscow, Jerusalem and Madrid trying to explain what a NT Greek
"sentence" is for quite a while now. Nearly two decades ago I did a fair
bit of reading in Transformational Grammar (Early Chomsky). This school of
thought was what might be called "the cult of the sentence." I can see the
notion of sentence working fine for English since we have periods (little
black dots) which define the end of one. But have you ever read Faulkner or
Virginia Woolf (The Waves)? Even in English the sentence has problems. But
the little black dot does help disambiguate the question somewhat.
However when it comes to Hellenistic Greek we are in a real bind to figure
out what a sentence is. Every attempt I have seen to define a sentence falls
into the trap of mixing syntactic issues with semantic issues. Sentences in
Hellenistic Greek if they exist at all must be defined semantically. There
are not any means for defining them syntactically. However a clause is
something which can be defined syntactically. You can write a fairly good
set of syntax rules for a NT Greek clause. I did some of this 15 years ago
but have long since lost interest in this sort of project.
So the final show down comes in determining if a sentence will be defined in
terms of syntax or in terms of semantics. Being somewhat of a recovering
early Chomsky type I tend to assume without argument that a sentence as a
syntactic thing not a semantic thing.
I assume this further muddles the issue.
Must go back in my cave again. Work to do.
Clay
--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062
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