Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of article

Jonathan Robie
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Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of article

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote:For my dissertation, I found that the traditional grammars were inadequate for word order and certain uses of the article.
What uses of the article, and what should be said about them? When should it be taught, if we were to write a grammar from scratch? What kind of linguistics is best for understanding these uses of the article?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

It has been talked about before in this forum, I think Iver has mentioned it not too long ago. Richard Hoyle covers the article in his dissertation on scenarios. His treatment surpasses everything you will find in the standard grammars.
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stirling Bartholomew wrote:It has been talked about before in this forum, I think Iver has mentioned it not too long ago. Richard Hoyle covers the article in his dissertation on scenarios. His treatment surpasses everything you will find in the standard grammars.
Is this the right thing to read?

http://www.sil.org/silepubs/Pubs/50670/ ... lation.pdf
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

Jonathan Robie wrote:
Stirling Bartholomew wrote:It has been talked about before in this forum, I think Iver has mentioned it not too long ago. Richard Hoyle covers the article in his dissertation on scenarios. His treatment surpasses everything you will find in the standard grammars.
Is this the right thing to read?

http://www.sil.org/silepubs/Pubs/50670/ ... lation.pdf
That's it.
6.1. The meaning of the article in Greek p141ff
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:For my dissertation, I found that the traditional grammars were inadequate for word order and certain uses of the article.
What uses of the article, and what should be said about them?
The uses I found puzzling what the use and non-use of the article with semantically definite nouns. For example, names like Peter (Πέτρος) refer to a definite, specific person, but the article is sometimes used and sometimes not used, even though the definiteness of the person does not change. The question is why and under what circumstance will a name have or not have the article.
Jonathan Robie wrote:When should it be taught, if we were to write a grammar from scratch?
I view pedagogy and (reference) grammars as serving two different purposes. A primer used in teaching should introduce concepts in some kind of order that builds on each other and hopefully gets the student to be reading and composing Greek as quickly as possible. But a reference grammar ought to be structured more logically.
Jonathan Robie wrote:What kind of linguistics is best for understanding these uses of the article?
Information structure, which deals with how assertions and presuppositions are packaged into statements.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote:The uses I found puzzling what the use and non-use of the article with semantically definite nouns. For example, names like Peter (Πέτρος) refer to a definite, specific person, but the article is sometimes used and sometimes not used, even though the definiteness of the person does not change. The question is why and under what circumstance will a name have or not have the article.
Stephen Carlson wrote:
Jonathan Robie wrote:What kind of linguistics is best for understanding these uses of the article?
Information structure, which deals with how assertions and presuppositions are packaged into statements.
OK, why and under what circumstance will a name have or not have the article? How does information sructure help answer this question? What's the best tutorial read on information structure?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by Ken M. Penner »

Jonathan Robie wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:The uses I found puzzling what the use and non-use of the article with semantically definite nouns. For example, names like Peter (Πέτρος) refer to a definite, specific person, but the article is sometimes used and sometimes not used, even though the definiteness of the person does not change. The question is why and under what circumstance will a name have or not have the article.
...
OK, why and under what circumstance will a name have or not have the article?
For other readers following this topic, we considered this question earlier on B-Greek. See viewtopic.php?f=51&t=433&p=1811#p1806
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Stephen Carlson
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:
Jonathan Robie wrote:What kind of linguistics is best for understanding these uses of the article?
Information structure, which deals with how assertions and presuppositions are packaged into statements.
OK, why and under what circumstance will a name have or not have the article? How does information sructure help answer this question? What's the best tutorial read on information structure?
The best tutorial currently is Stephen Levinsohn, Discourse Features of New Testament Greek (2d ed., 2000). Some parts are a little out of date, but I understand there is a third edition in the works. The quick answer is that with declinable names, they will generally have the article when then belong to the presupposition instead of the assertion. In other words, the default is that they have the article (indeed, this is virtually obligatory in modern Greek), but the article may be omitted when it is the first time (in a section) that someone is introduced or if the person is somehow emphasized.

To the extent traditional grammars dealt with this at all, they considered the article anaphoric, which only covers some of the cases. Traditional grammars do not deal with information structure and do not have the terminology or the theoretical basis for explaining the basic concepts. Though some parts of the theory have been anticipated as early as 1844 (by Henri Weil), the study of information structure did not really blossom until the 1970s, so it is unfortunately still rather new and to some extent immature. The seminal work applying this work to ancient Greek is Helma Dik, Word Order in Ancient Greek: A Pragmatic Account of Word Order Variation in Herodotus (Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology 5; Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1995), pp. xii + 294, ISBN 90-5063-457-5. But there is still a lot of room for additional research.
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MAubrey
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by MAubrey »

There's also Stephen Levinsohn and Jenny Read-Heimerdinger's article, “The Use of the Definitive Article before Names of People in the Greek Text of Acts with Particular Reference to Codex Bezae,” Filología Neotestamentaria 5:1992, which predates Helma Dik's monograph.
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Stephen Carlson
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by Stephen Carlson »

I just noticed the following dissertation, recently out of Dallas, in which Levinsohn was the external examiner:
The Greek article in Pauline literature: Traditional grammar and discourse perspectives
by Janssen, Stephen A., Ph.D., DALLAS THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, 2013, 307 pages; 3570144
Abstract:

The thesis of this dissertation is that, in the New Testament Pauline letters, the article is used with a noun only if the writer assumes identifiability on the part of the reader, and does not wish to give prominence to the constituent concerned. Otherwise, the anarthrousness of a constituent that is assumed by the author to be known and identifiable marks its focal (or, less frequently, thematic) prominence. The understanding of this principle brings clarity to the presence or absence of the article in a number of puzzling circumstances, and therefore aids in the exegesis of many passages in the literature.

The body of the dissertation first surveys important literature in the traditional study of the Greek article. It also looks at the theories of a number of well-known and prominent modern linguists as regards identifiability, and its relation to article use for languages that have articles. The principle of identifiability is here asserted as the key principle for article use with individual nouns in Greek. Next, the dissertation proposes constituent order in functional linguistics as an alternative to statistically based studies. Also, of importance here is the discussion of topic and topicalization, focus and dominant focal element, and prominence. All this provides a context for the subsequent consideration of the article in terms of non-identifiability, identifiability and focal (and thematic) prominence. These principles are then applied to a number of passages from the literature to demonstrate their veracity. Finally, recommendations are made for a number of categories of traditional grammar of the Greek article, some of which need modification or significant change, while others could be eliminated altogether.
I have not read this (yet). Janssen's earlier theses seem to be in a similar vein.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
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