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RE: What is a Greek Sentence?



At 11:42 AM +0000 6/4/97, Clayton Bartholomew wrote:

>A minor note of clarification. Now that I understand what elliptical
>means, it is not related
>in any way to self referencing or recursive. Elliptical simply means that
>the subject or
>some other component of a subordinate clause is not explicitly stated.
>Correct?

Exactly. That's what the term means.

>Self referencing or recursive is a characteristic of clauses where one
>clause is embedded
>in another clause. The structural definition of a K. Greek clause is self
>referencing
>because the definition includes the term *clause*. This indicates that a
>clause can contain
>clauses down to N levels. Jonathan and Andrew should understand this
>terminology.

This is what linguists call a recursive syntactic process. For example, a
clause can contain a noun (N) and a verb (V). But it can also contain
another [subordinate] clause (C), which can contain an N and a V, or an N,
a V and a C, which can contain...

This recursive nature of the clause, combined with the extensive
morphological marking for case and the intricate use of pronouns,
conjunctions, and other markers of cohesion means that the Greek sentence
can develop a level of complexity which often makes it indistinguishable
from the paragraph.

I do think, though, that there is a legitimate place for the notion
'sentence' when talking about hellenistic Greek. There are clear compenents
to most paragraphs. (As Carl has pointed out, the clarity varies
considerably from one author to another.) Some clauses in a paragraph hold
a much tighter semantic and syntactic connection with one another than with
other clauses in the same paragraph. While the sentence is difficult to
define in such a way that the definition covers every possible occurrance,
we can define the core of what a sentence is--as Carl put it, a subject and
a predicate (with or without a verb). This is actually a definition of a
clause, but it can be expanded to include the sentence once we incorporate
Clayton's comments on recursion.


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Micheal W. Palmer				   mwpalmer@earthlink.net
Religion & Philosophy
Meredith College

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