Word Order of Genitive (Enclitic) Pronouns

Iver Larsen
Posts: 127
Joined: May 7th, 2011, 3:52 am

Re: Word Order of Genitive (Enclitic) Pronouns

Post by Iver Larsen »

Stephen Carlson wrote:
Iver Larsen wrote:Maybe I need to ask the question in a different forum? For this exercise I am not interested in the difference between word stress and pitch accent. English is a stress language, but stress is not marked in the writing system, so I tried to put italics on the words that I would expect to be stressed. I am not a native speaker of English, but I expect the first sentence to have a normal word stress pattern. Maybe I needed to mark both secondary and primary stress, but that is more difficult to type, and I am not sure I am competent in English to do that.
Here's the deal. English has both word stress and a pitch accent. The word stress is lexical, but the pitch accent is supra-segmental (Swedish has a lexical pitch accent, by the way). The English pitch accent is always aligned on a word stress (with one rare exception). There is usually one, but sometimes two, pitch accents within an intonation contour (basically a simple clause). Since word stress is lexical, it does not convey emphasis. Rather, English speakers sense "emphasis" wherever the pitch accent occurs, and it will occur where the word stress is.

So the the difference between word stress and pitch accents is important, regardless of your interest in them.
Iver Larsen wrote: I am interested in hearing how a native speaker who has not studied linguistic theories would understand the difference between the two.
I realize that I've probably studied too much of this topic for you to be interested in my opinion, but, if you are sincerely interested in the naive intuitions about the English sentences, you would need to forget the word stresses and just mark the pitch accents, just one (or possibly two) per clause. We have an actor in the States by the name of William Shatner, who is parodied for emphasizing too many words in a sentence. That's how your sentences sound to this native English speaker.
Thank you. It is helpful for me to understand (American?) English better. As I said I am not a native speaker of English, so I am happy to be instructed about English. In order to benefit from native speaker intuition I really need to start out with Danish, which would be

1. Hvis DU havde været her, var min BROR ikke død
1a. If you had been here, my brother would not be dead (We cannot say: would not have died.)
We use stress rather than pitch unlike English, Swedish and Norwegian. We have primary and secondary stress, so I have now marked the primary stress with italics and the secondary stress with capitals. Secondary stress does not seem to exist in English, so that confused me. 1. above is similar to what Randall wrote earlier, and it fits the Greek sentence:
1b. εἰ ἦς ὧδε οὐκ ἂν ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός μου (John 11:21)

It would be possible to emphasize "you" as well as "here" in Danish by changing from secondary or no stress to primary stress, but that kind of emphasis is not in the Greek sentence and it would not be natural and expected in the context.

Maybe the reason I did not get an answer to my question is that it does not work well or is not clear in English.
The question was in what way John 11:32 is different from 11:21:
2. εἰ ἦς ὧδε οὐκ ἄν μου ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός.
In Danish I would express the difference as I see it by changing the stress as follows:
2a. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD
(2b If you had been here, my brother would not be dead.)

Other options are:
3. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD (That would suggest a contrast between a brother and, say, a sister.)
4. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD (That would suggest a contrast between my brother and someone else's brother.)

These nuances are complex and can vary even between closely related languages as well as between speakers of the same language. Since we do not have a KOINE native speaker intuition, we can hardly be dogmatic about the best analysis. What makes best sense to me does not necessarily make sense to others.
Stephen Carlson
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Re: Word Order of Genitive (Enclitic) Pronouns

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Iver Larsen wrote:Thank you. It is helpful for me to understand (American?) English better. As I said I am not a native speaker of English, so I am happy to be instructed about English. In order to benefit from native speaker intuition I really need to start out with Danish, which would be

1. Hvis DU havde været her, var min BROR ikke død
1a. If you had been here, my brother would not be dead (We cannot say: would not have died.)
We use stress rather than pitch unlike English, Swedish and Norwegian. We have primary and secondary stress, so I have now marked the primary stress with italics and the secondary stress with capitals. Secondary stress does not seem to exist in English, so that confused me. 1. above is similar to what Randall wrote earlier, and it fits the Greek sentence:
1b. εἰ ἦς ὧδε οὐκ ἂν ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός μου (John 11:21)
Thanks for that, Iver. That's pretty helpful. I did some poking around and, yes indeed, Danish is fairly unusual in that it has no (obligatory) sentence level / pitch accent. I think that explains why your English examples did not have it marked.

For what's worth, I slightly disagree with Randy and think Martha's statement would correspond to an "all-comment" or "out of the blue" statement, which is typically conveyed by accenting the subject: "If you had been here, my brother wouldn't have died." Knud Lambrecht's favorite example of this is: "Q: What happened? A: My car broke down." (Note that the English "all comment" has the same intonation as subject focus, so it's ambiguous out of context.)
Iver Larsen wrote:Maybe the reason I did not get an answer to my question is that it does not work well or is not clear in English.
The question was in what way John 11:32 is different from 11:21:
2. εἰ ἦς ὧδε οὐκ ἄν μου ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός.
In Danish I would express the difference as I see it by changing the stress as follows:
2a. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD
(2b If you had been here, my brother would not be dead.)

Other options are:
3. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD (That would suggest a contrast between a brother and, say, a sister.)
4. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD (That would suggest a contrast between my brother and someone else's brother.)

These nuances are complex and can vary even between closely related languages as well as between speakers of the same language. Since we do not have a KOINE native speaker intuition, we can hardly be dogmatic about the best analysis. What makes best sense to me does not necessarily make sense to others.
I can't really speak to the Danish nor do I have a clue what accenting both my brother would feel like in English, except as something artificial. I do have a question for you, though: if your theory is that leftward is more prominent, why would οὐκ ἄν μου ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός--with μου close to the front and ὁ ἀδελφός last--correspond to "var min bror ikke DØD" with both parts of the noun phrase equally stressed?

Also, if the Greek negation οὐκ is leftmost in the clause and even separated from its verb, according to your left=prominent theory, it should be prominent. So why don't you stress "ikke" in any of your Danish examples? Is it because one cannot stress "ikke" in Danish or is there some other reason? (The Swedish negation "inte" is often stressed in my experience.)
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Iver Larsen
Posts: 127
Joined: May 7th, 2011, 3:52 am

Re: Word Order of Genitive (Enclitic) Pronouns

Post by Iver Larsen »

Stephen Carlson wrote:
Iver Larsen wrote:...
1. Hvis DU havde været her, var min BROR ikke død
1a. If you had been here, my brother would not be dead (We cannot say: would not have died.)
We use stress rather than pitch unlike English, Swedish and Norwegian. We have primary and secondary stress, so I have now marked the primary stress with italics and the secondary stress with capitals. Secondary stress does not seem to exist in English, so that confused me. 1. above is similar to what Randall wrote earlier, and it fits the Greek sentence:
1b. εἰ ἦς ὧδε οὐκ ἂν ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός μου (John 11:21)
Thanks for that, Iver. That's pretty helpful. I did some poking around and, yes indeed, Danish is fairly unusual in that it has no (obligatory) sentence level / pitch accent. I think that explains why your English examples did not have it marked.

For what's worth, I slightly disagree with Randy and think Martha's statement would correspond to an "all-comment" or "out of the blue" statement, which is typically conveyed by accenting the subject: "If you had been here, my brother wouldn't have died." Knud Lambrecht's favorite example of this is: "Q: What happened? A: My car broke down." (Note that the English "all comment" has the same intonation as subject focus, so it's ambiguous out of context.)
Iver Larsen wrote:Maybe the reason I did not get an answer to my question is that it does not work well or is not clear in English.
The question was in what way John 11:32 is different from 11:21:
2. εἰ ἦς ὧδε οὐκ ἄν μου ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός.
In Danish I would express the difference as I see it by changing the stress as follows:
2a. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD
(2b If you had been here, my brother would not be dead.)

Other options are:
3. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD (That would suggest a contrast between a brother and, say, a sister.)
4. Hvis DU havde været her, var min bror ikke DØD (That would suggest a contrast between my brother and someone else's brother.)

These nuances are complex and can vary even between closely related languages as well as between speakers of the same language. Since we do not have a KOINE native speaker intuition, we can hardly be dogmatic about the best analysis. What makes best sense to me does not necessarily make sense to others.
I can't really speak to the Danish nor do I have a clue what accenting both my brother would feel like in English, except as something artificial. I do have a question for you, though: if your theory is that leftward is more prominent, why would οὐκ ἄν μου ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἀδελφός--with μου close to the front and ὁ ἀδελφός last--correspond to "var min bror ikke DØD" with both parts of the noun phrase equally stressed?

Also, if the Greek negation οὐκ is leftmost in the clause and even separated from its verb, according to your left=prominent theory, it should be prominent. So why don't you stress "ikke" in any of your Danish examples? Is it because one cannot stress "ikke" in Danish or is there some other reason? (The Swedish negation "inte" is often stressed in my experience.)
In Danish for "my car broke down", we would have primary stress on broke down and secondary stress on "car". That appears to be different from English.

For your first question, probably becaues of my background, I am operating with three levels: no stress, secondary stress and primary stress. That is part of the reason why I also operate with relative emphasis. Secondary stress is slightly more prominent than no stress and primary stress is more prominent than secondary. So, in sentence 2 the dying is still prominent at the clause level. Because μου is part of the NP, it gives a certain prominence to that NP. I can make a disctinction between 2 and 4 in Danish, but I don't think I could point to anything like that disctinction in Greek word order. That would have to come from context. There is considerable leeway for personal preferences here. For John 11:21 - but not John 11:32 - we have a number of variant readings where copyists appear to play around with word order.

For your second question, I separate word order function at clause level from word order function at phrase level. As far as I can see οὐκ functions at the clause level and negates the whole proposition. We can stress the Danish negation, but that is more like οὐ μὴ in Greek. The principle of left-ward prominency does not apply to a number of sentence connectors and words like οὐκ. However, if there is no verb in the sentence, it is possible that the negation would connect more closely with a noun phrase. One example would be:
Mat 7:29 καὶ οὐχ ὡς οἱ γραμματεῖς αὐτῶν
Here, I might well stress the negation: and not like their scribes
Another one would be
Mat 9:13 Ἔλεος θέλω καὶ οὐ θυσίαν (It is mercy I want, and not sacrifice)
In these cases, a contrast is (always?) supported by context.
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