Stéphanie Bakker, The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek

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Stephen Carlson
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Stéphanie Bakker, The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek

Post by Stephen Carlson »

MAubrey wrote:There's also Stephanie Bakker's monograph, The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek. The first half is on the internal ordering on noun phrases, but the second half is on the use of the article.
That's a nice book too. If I recall correctly, however, she doesn't do much with the use of the article in terms of the prominence or focus of the entire noun phrase. Also, I'm becoming a little disappointed in her theory of the article in the second half. Yeah, it's much better than what you see among Greek grammarians, but compared with the literature outside of Greek, well, it's a little superficial. I'm not sure she's fully grasped the contours of the debate on definiteness as it exists based on what appears in her monograph.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
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Re: Traditional grammars inadequate for certain uses of arti

Post by MAubrey »

Stephen Carlson wrote:
MAubrey wrote:There's also Stephanie Bakker's monograph, The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek. The first half is on the internal ordering on noun phrases, but the second half is on the use of the article.
That's a nice book too. If I recall correctly, however, she doesn't do much with the use of the article in terms of the prominence or focus of the entire noun phrase. Also, I'm becoming a little disappointed in her theory of the article in the second half. Yeah, it's much better than what you see among Greek grammarians, but compared with the literature outside of Greek, well, it's a little superficial. I'm not sure she's fully grasped the contours of the debate on definiteness as it exists based on what appears in her monograph.
Could you give some examples? My impression was the exact opposite of yours: that part one was superficial and part 2 was quite substantive.
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Stephen Carlson
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Re: Stéphanie Bakker, The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Well, I'm mostly concerned with chapter 5. It's important to realize that she does not set out to set out a full theory of the Greek article, but even so it really only covers the easy cases and ignores the harder cases, by her very terms.

Early on chapter 5, she discusses the discourse explanations for the use of the article by Rijksbaron and Sansone, both of which anticipate Levinsohn in certain respects (Bakker's monograph, however, knows nothing of Levinsohn's work). After briefly describing their proposals, she states:
Bakker 2009:151-152 wrote:Though the analyses of Sansone and Rijksbaron are different, their conclusions both seem to suggest that the function of the article in Ancient Greek (at least with abstract and proper nouns) differs widely from the function of the article in other Indo-European languages. However, before jumping to the conclusion that the article in Ancient Greek does indeed have a different function, it should first be analysed what the function of the article in other Indo-European languages is.
OK, so far so good. Then, in an analysis that seems to miss some of the contours of the debate (esp. over its polysemy [roughly: having distinct, but relatable meanings]), she goes on to propose a monosemous definition for the article (cf. p. 147 "define a basic meaning for the article"):
Bakker 2009:162 wrote:I therefore conclude that a definite article is appropriate if the speaker presents the referent in question as unequivocally relatable to an available cognitive structure that is relevant in a given discourse.
As for the failure to use the article, she proposes:
Bakker 2009:165 wrote:If the Greek definite article marks identifiability, the absence of an article should indicate that the referent of the NT cannot unequivocally be related to an available cognitive structure, either because the relation between the referent and the cognitive structure is not unequivocable, or because the referent is not related to an available cognitive structure at all.
To this proposal, she finds five exceptions, which will not concern us here.

At the end of the chapter, she finally gets around to the use of the article with proper names that Riijsbaron and Sansone were concerned about:
Bakker 2009:214 wrote:In all probability, the differences in use of the article between Ancient Greek and modern languages with definiteness marking would have been more extensive if NPs with proper names, geographical names, abstracts and substantivised adjectives, participles etc. were also taken into consideration. As I argued in the introduction of this chapter, however, these NPs were not included in my analysis of definiteness, since this chapter is not meant to be an exhaustive overview of the use of the Ancient Greek article (which would readily become a book in itself), but only as preface to the analysis of the articulation of NP constituents, which is the topic of the next chapter.
Oh well, that's disappointing.These uses of the article are especially difficult in Greek, and her definition doesn't help, at all. Proper names, after all, are by-and-large identifiable, yet they can lack the article, despite her proposals

Completely neglected (as far as I can tell) is that she did not deal with the difficult notion of "weak definites," where the article marks a noun that is not identifiable. In fact, one of her examples, in the first part of the work, features such an instance but she says nothing about it in the second part:
Bakker 2009:117, bold original, underlining added wrote:(49) ἦν δέ Δαρεῖον ἀνὴρ Αἰγύπριος φωνέων μέγιστρον ἀνθρώπων· τοῦτον τὸν ἄνδρα καταστάντα ἐπὶ τοῦ χείλεος τοῦ Ἴστρου ἐκέλευε Δαρεῖος καλέειν Ἱσταῖον Μιλήσιον·

There was an Egyptian with Dareios whose voice was the loudest in the world (lit. man Egyptian voiced loudest of men); Dareios had this man stand on the bank of the Ister and call to Histaios the Milesian. (Hdt. 4.141)
Since rivers have two banks, the bank of the Ister is not identifiable. Which bank was it? Bakker doesn't say. (River banks are a classic counter-example to identifability in the literature on weak definites).

To be fair, on p. 146, she says that she is only analyzing the article in Books 2 and 7, and this example is in Book 4. But it is nonetheless an example that she had examined closely, and I'm struck that it never triggered something to question her definition of the definite article. As a result, I have to wonder how many weak definites were missed by her analysis of those two books.

Granted, her overview on the article in chapter 5 was only meant to be a preface for her particular study of the articulation of noun phrase constituents in chapter 6 (stated on p. 146). Thus it could be considered unreasonable if not a bit rude to complain that her intentionally limited treatment of the article in chapter 5 is, well, superficial or inadequate. But at the same time, I couldn't really make use of it for developing a theory of the Greek article.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
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