MAubrey wrote:Stephen Carlson wrote:MAubrey wrote:Sentence accent position: on the indicative verb vs. on the infinitive verb.
Ok, let's elaborate this. What would it mean for the sentence accent to be on ἤρξατο for Mark 6:7 in context? Heck, it's hard to see why Mark said ἤρξατο in the first place, much less that it would bear the sentence accent over the more obvious (?) ἀποστέλλειν.
What makes it obvious (or "more obvious", I should say)?
I've been looking at the data, especially in Mark.
MAubrey wrote:I would expect that the choice of using ἤρξατο was predicated on Mark needing an unambiguous means of expressing the initiation of an event on the mainline. Granted he could have used an imperfect, but usually for mainline narrative, he tries to keep imperfect to particular contexts at the end of a given pericope rather than in the middle like here.
I was looking for how this fits in the context, and it turns out that Joel Marcus, in the commentary I quoted above, gives a satisfactory account.
MAubrey wrote:Anyway, I'm not sure it would need to mean anything at all, to be honest. Putting it at the beginning of a verb-initial clause is expected as an unmarked prosody. Nor is it particularly surprising to put it on the infinitive. With a simple topic-comment construction, neither are necessarily unexpected. All I can say is that I know what the data normally does and then when I encounter a contrast like this, I continue to assume that's what it's still doing. Contrasts like this are almost impossible to decide on.
Choice implies meaning, except when it doesn't?
MAubrey wrote:Here's my suspicion, however, for a more elaborated explanation:
Mark 6:34 is short and it's single prosodic unit:
[Φ ἤρξατο διδάσκειν αὐτοὺς πολλά]
Mark 6:7 is a bit longer and it's structure suggests a prosodic break between the first pronoun and the infinitive:
[Φ ἤρξατο αὐτοὺς] [Φ ἀποστέλλειν δύο δύο].
Placing αὐτοὺς after the infinitive in 6:7 would create a situation where you have either one prosodic unit that's too ungainly or you have two prosodic units that aren't very balanced.
I agree that a prosodic analysis is important, and that Mark 6:7 has a prosodic break (though I locate it differently) but this prosodic break is ultimately not relevant to the issue at hand. The key difference, as I see it, is what's going on at the beginning of the clauses:
Mark 6:34 wrote:[φ [ω ἤρξατο διδάσκειν] αὐτοὺς πολλά]
Mark 6:7 wrote:[φ ἤρξατο αύτοὺς ἀποστέλλειν] [φ δύο δύο]
I have adopted the working hypothesis, that in certain cases two lexical words may be unified to count as a single prosodic word. This includes noun-incorporation into verbs, hendiadys, and verbal periphrasis. (This hypothesis easily works with standard views of the prosodic hierarchy where prosodic words can be recursive, but there are also non-recursive analyses where this fits, namely more levels in the hierarchy or some kind of demotion.)
The difference between these two cases then is whether the first two lexical words are incorporated into a complex phonological word or not. Helpful to me is that this difference appears to be reflected in the meanings: Mark 6:34 is an instance of Mark's favorite periphrastic ἄρξασθαι + inf. construction in which ἄρξασθαι has undergone semantic bleaching to become an aspectualizer (so that the construction as a whole functions like an inceptive imperfect), while in Mark 6:7 ἤρξατο maintains its full lexical meaning and here refers to Jesus's initiation of the apostles' ministry per Marcus's commentary.
In both cases, then, αὐτούς comes after the first full phonological word, but the make-up of the first phonological word differs. The rest of the rules operate as usual: the nuclear accent falls on the left edge of these clauses (the first
φ), but on the right edge of
ω. Or, as someone put it earlier in the thread, "Sentence accent position: on the indicative verb vs. on the infinitive verb."
MAubrey wrote:All this assumes that we can confidently treat αὐτούς as a second position enclitic and that's kind of beyond what we can confidently know. Still, I think it makes sense as an extrapolation.
Well, yes and no. It is not enclitic because it does not shift the accent of its host to the right in accordance with the Law of Limitation. But, yes, both Frank Scheppers and Tom Recht have argued that non-emphatic αὐτούς has a tendency to second position after the first full phonological word. I am currently testing this claim in the New Testament, and it mostly holds except for a bunch of apparent third position cases (like Mark 6:34 for certain verbal periphrastics) and a handful of apparent fourth+ position cases. In my view, an adequate account of the placement of oblique forms of αύτός must explain not only the second-position cases but those which appear to come later.