functional linguistics

From: Philip L. Graber (omc01091@mail.wvnet.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 30 1998 - 08:08:06 EST


Since there seems to be some interest in this, I am resending to the list a
message that I sent directly to Perry in response to his query.

At 10:48 AM 3/29/98 +1100, Perry Wiles wrote:
>Is anyone aware of any works that seek to treat Koine Greek from a
>functional grammar point of view??

Judging from your location, I'm guessing that by "functional grammar" you
probably have in mind systemics as done by Halliday, Martin, Hasan, Eggins,
etc. in Australia. There is not much of this done for Koine Greek. The
work by Porter on aspect, which is regularly referred to on this list, uses
systemic terminology, but does not really develop a systemic grammar.

The best thing available to date is *A Discourse Analysis of Philippians*
by Jeffrey Reed, published in the JSNTS series (#136) by Sheffield; it was
originally a doctoral thesis done at Sheffield. The first part contains a
kind of "quick and dirty" systemic grammar of Koine Greek, but of course
the emphasis is on those areas that Reed needs for his discourse analysis
of Philippians, which appears in the second part.

I am working on a doctoral thesis that also contains a "mini-grammar" done
according to the systemic functional model. Mine is not much more complete
than Reed's, but it has information his doesn't, because the purpose of my
thesis is different--I'm looking at the relationship between semantics
(metafunctions) and context (register) in Mt 13:1-23 and parallels, so I
develop the metafunctions and register variables in ways Reed does not.

I hope this helps.

Rev. Philip L. Graber <omc01091@mail.wvnet.edu>
Ronceverte Presbyterian Church
305 Locust Street
Ronceverte, WV 24970 USA
Phone: 304-647-4400



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