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EAGLL Article on Word Order

Posted: January 18th, 2015, 6:31 pm
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.

Re: EAGLL Article on Word Order

Posted: January 19th, 2015, 4:35 am
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. :) )

Re: EAGLL Article on Word Order

Posted: January 19th, 2015, 3:56 pm
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.

Re: EAGLL Article on Word Order

Posted: January 19th, 2015, 6:38 pm
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).