EAGLL Article on Word Order

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Stephen Carlson
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EAGLL Article on Word Order

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Giuseppe Celano's article on Greek word order in the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics has been upload to academia.edu here: https://www.academia.edu/3291749/Celano ... iden_Brill

I'm very pleased that many articles from this absurdly expensive encyclopedia have been individual made freely available on various sites on the internet, especially on academia.edu.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
RandallButh
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Re: EAGLL Article on Word Order

Post by RandallButh »

thank you for the reference to the article.

On the whole, it is good to have access, but I found the article itself disappointing. Celano mentioned that there were multiple layers and perspectives but in criticizing Helma Dik's template he became one dimensional. He could not distinguish a specially-marked Topic from an non-specially-marked Topic. Nor could he distinguish a Subject marked for Topic from a Subject that was not marked for Topic. Dik's template is to be preferred to the muddle of the article.
(Disclaimer: one might say that I have a conflict of interest since I think highly of the Functional Grammar within which Helma works. So be it. There is no shame in being right. :) )
Stirling Bartholomew
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Re: EAGLL Article on Word Order

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

RandallButh wrote:thank you for the reference to the article.

… but I found the article itself disappointing. ...
(Disclaimer: one might say that I have a conflict of interest since I think highly of the Functional Grammar within which Helma works. So be it. There is no shame in being right. :)
I used to think Functional Grammar was gonna answer my word order questions. But not all the time, not even most of the time. I have casual unsystematic observations about word order that haven't been addressed within any of the frameworks I am aware of. For example, reading Attic prose and Tragedy there seems to be a tendency to stack dependent constituents to the left of the constituent to which they are dependent. For example main verb clause final position or a substantive following everything that qualifies that substantive. I am not call this a rule. I am just saying it happens often enough to be noticed.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Stephen Carlson
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Re: EAGLL Article on Word Order

Post by Stephen Carlson »

RandallButh wrote:thank you for the reference to the article.
No problem. Just to be clear, my posting links is not meant to be an endorsement. Otherwise, I wouldn't post links at all.
RandallButh wrote:On the whole, it is good to have access, but I found the article itself disappointing. Celano mentioned that there were multiple layers and perspectives but in criticizing Helma Dik's template he became one dimensional. He could not distinguish a specially-marked Topic from an non-specially-marked Topic. Nor could he distinguish a Subject marked for Topic from a Subject that was not marked for Topic. Dik's template is to be preferred to the muddle of the article.
(Disclaimer: one might say that I have a conflict of interest since I think highly of the Functional Grammar within which Helma works. So be it. There is no shame in being right. :) )
Hmm, I thought he was trying to deal with the complexities, since Dik's template covers only so much. Then again, he seems to point out a bunch of exceptions without having a clear explanation for them (some of which I feel can be explained by the prosody, especially of de-emphasized constituents).
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
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