[b-greek] Re: Greek Sentence Structure

From: Dave Washburn (dwashbur@nyx.net)
Date: Wed Jul 25 2001 - 23:24:34 EDT


Clay,
> So the final show down comes in determining if a sentence will be defined in
> terms of syntax or in terms of semantics. Being somewhat of a recovering
> early Chomsky type I tend to assume without argument that a sentence as a
> syntactic thing not a semantic thing.
>
> I assume this further muddles the issue.

As a Chomskyite myself (though I reject pretty much everything
from government-binding on) I don't use the term "sentence" at all
in my linguistic pursuits. It's a meaningless term, as you have
discovered. I am also in the process of weaning myself away from
the term "clause" because it tends to diminish in meaning across
various languages. Having now tentatively applied my modified
version of Chomsky's EST to Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and a
couple of other languages, I have come to the conclusion that we
should be talking about verb phrases. Chomsky did some nifty
mathematical things in English by separating the subject from the
scope of the verb phrase, but from what I've seen it only works in
English. Most of my syntactic work has been in Hebrew rather
than Greek, but the principles seem to be the same: the subject is
an inherent part of VP. Hence, I don't see a node higher than VP
because the entirety of what we have been calling a "clause" falls
within its scope (subject, predicate, complements and adjuncts).
YMMV.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"You just keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at."


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