Re: Theme/Rheme

From: Philip L. Graber (omc01091@mail.wvnet.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 08 1998 - 14:29:19 EDT


At 10:29 PM 7/7/98 +1000, pwiles wrote:
>I have been reading M Halliday's "An Introduction to Functional Grammar"
>and using an associated work book, and have a question re possible
>application of some functional grammar concepts to greek.

Perry,

There is very little work done in NT Greek from Halliday's perspective.
Most of those listed by Clayton Stirling Bartholomew do not use systemic
functional grammar (SFG). Those who have used SFG have tended to be rather
ecclectic, and not pushed the model as far as it will go. (Stanley Porter
tends to use the British systemic model associated with Robin Fawcett
rather than Halliday's version, in addition to being ecclectic. Some of
the best work on Greek and SFG is done by Jeffrey T. Reed [e.g., *A
Discourse Analysis of Philippians: Method and Rhetoric in the Debate over
Literary Integrity*, JSNT Supplementary Series 136, Sheffield Academic
Press, 1997], but his work is more ecclectic than Porter's.) I am
intending to do some work in this area in my dissertation, but my work has
slowed significantly lately.

In addition to what Clayton listed, a work worthy of note is Helma Dik,
*Word Order in Ancient Greek: A Pragmatic Account of Word Order Variation
in Herodotus*, Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, Amsterdam: J.C.
Gieben, 1995. She uses Simon Dik's Function Grammar for method. The
abstract reads as follows:

"Greek word order, notoriously 'free, yet not random', has puzzled scholars
at least since Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Some have formulated rigid
syntactical rules that immediately break down when checked against any
sample of text, others have given impressionistic accounts that failed to
make any real claims.
"Insights gained from the field of pragmatics can now help us to steer
clear of this Scylla and Charybdis. Seeing word order as a reflection of
discourse planning and information structuring by the speaker or author can
provide us with the right perspective for explaining it.
"After an introduction and theoretical preliminaires, this book presents a
proposal for a unified description of Greek word order, which takes the
form of a clause pattern with designated positions for the verb and for
constituents with the pragmatic functions of Topic and Focus. This
proposal is examined in a number of case studies in Herodotus' *Histories*,
including a clause-by-clause commentary on short samples of expository and
narrative text. A final chapter presents a contrastive review of earlier
analyses."

As you may have guessed from this abstract, Dik does not come up with a
list of hard and fast rules, but she does conclude that pragmatics rather
than syntax is the major determinant of word order. In her penultimate
chapter, she does conclude that clause-initial position in expository text
marks the "subject" of what follows, what one might call a paragraph theme
in English.

Philip Graber
Ronceverte, West Virginia USA

---
B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek
You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu]
To unsubscribe, forward this message to unsubscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:39:53 EDT