Re: Fronting & Point of Departure

From: yochanan bitan (ButhFam@compuserve.com)
Date: Tue Apr 18 2000 - 17:09:15 EDT


<x-charset ISO-8859-1>shalom Clay,
egrapsas:
>If I understand your scheme correctly, the notion of a fronted constituent
>is determined by the "default" word order of the language. So if we take
>English as a SVO language the fronted constituent would be in position P,
>prior to SVO, thus PSVO. If we take NT Greek as a VSO language. The
>pragmatic slot (P) would appear before the default pattern thus PVSO.

Yes

>The thing that makes it a little hard to grasp this approach to pragmatics
>is that the model seems to be imposed from without. Not having read all
the
>literature on language universals one has to more or less take someone's
>word for it that the pragmatic slot is going to be clause initial.
>
>One physical analogy that I have used to help me grasp this is thinking of
>NT Greek paragraphs as blocks of wood that need to be joined by gluing.

Nice analogy with wood blocks. I'll probably use it some time in a class,
if you don't mind.
For your own methodological peace of mind there is also the internal
evidence/problem of 'explaining' sentences in any one language where the
semantics of two sentences are identical but the word order differs, only
one of which fits the most neutral/basic pattern of the language. That is
why I gave you an English example with two orders:
     ... The man got up in the morning. ...
     ... In the morning the man got up. ...
The strict semantic information of those two sentences is identical. But
the function and use of that information differs. Eventually, a reader in
any language must develop a strategy for processing these differences.
     You don't need the other languages for developing a strategy within
any one language. Just a lot of processing, reading, processing, reading,
and eventually, the attempt to articulate your findings for others to
benefit from or confirm. ( When linguists gather to compare notes it turns
out that the fronting-contextualizing strategy regularly occurs in
languages around the world. Differences, too, yes, and significant
overlap.)
     The only 'fly in the ointment' is when beginning students are given a
misleading 'rule of thumb' like: 'fronted constituents are EMPHASIZED'.
Then they read some ancient text and conclude that the authors are only
partially human and not interested in the same things as moderns at all,
that is, they regularly 'emphasize the marginal things' and frequently
don't emphasize what they could have or should have. (E.g, in my English
above, 'For ... peace of mind' provides a context but is not emphatic.)
     Well, at least the discourse studies and linguistic approaches have
helped students get around such detours.

errwso,
ve-Hag sameaH, "eortH eufrainomenH"
Randall Buth

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