Stephen Carlson wrote:RandallButh wrote:Stephen, that is generally true, both in Greek and across languages. However, Greek is something of a rare bird in this because it sometimes has things 'against the grain', that is, a Focal constituent will precede a 'frame of reference'. Maybe Steve R has a tagged text that can spit out a half dozen examples to illustrate this.
Thanks, Randy. I would love to see some examples of this. I'm not aware of any, but I don't any theoretical objection to it either.
preverbal focus & setting constituents Towards the beginning of his discussion of
Points of Departure Levinsohn 2000:9 cites Matt. 6:2a Ὅταν οὖν ποιῇς ἐλεημοσύνην, μὴ σαλπίσῃς ἔμπροσθέν σου. The conditional Ὅταν clause is according to Levinsohn a
point of departure. Helma Dik 2007:36-37 in her discussion of preverbal
Setting constituents[1] chooses to exclude from her her definition of
Settings anything which could be considered a clause in its own right, e.g., genitive absolutes, adverbial clauses, etc.
In his discussion of preverbal
focus constituents Levinsohn 2000:37 cites James 1:2 Πᾶσαν χαρὰν ἡγήσασθε, ἀδελφοί μου, ὅταν πειρασμοῖς περιπέσητε ποικίλοις. He marks Πᾶσαν χαρὰν as the
focus constituent but does not consider the conditional ὅταν clause a
Point of Departure. I would assume that the position of the ὅταν clause is the reason for not calling it a
Point of Departure.
I have not found an example of a
focus constituent followed by a
point of departure both in front of the main verb in the same clause. I am not saying this does not happen. However, Levinsohn 2000:37 states "Any point of departure that is present
will preceed any preverbal focal constituent" (italics in original). So perhaps we have a disagreement between Levinsohn and Buth?
I am tempted to depart both from Levinsohn and Helma Dik and suggest that the James 1:2b ὅταν clause functions as a contextualizer. My notion of a contextualizer includes clauses and does not depend on position relative to the clause being contextualized. So my contextualizer is not equal to Levinsohn's point of departure or Helma Dik's Setting.
[1] Helma Dik’s framework is only vaguely similar to Levinsohn’s, differences abound. Setting constituents are similar in some respects to Points of Departure, contextualizers, whatever.
C. Stirling Bartholomew