[b-greek] RE: Constituents in the "wrong places"?

From: Glenn Blank (glennblank@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Mar 27 2002 - 04:24:22 EST



>>But NA's Mr 4.30 be seems extreme, even for Greek
>>-- you have not only and noun separated from it's adjective,
>
>
>
>For your information: "its" does not have an apostrophe except when it is
>an abbreviation for "it is" or "it has". Not when, like here, it is simply
>a possessive. Anymore than you would put an apostrophe in other possessive
>pronouns like "hi's" or "her's" or "your's" - there is no apostrophe in
>pronouns.
>
>Regards,
>
>Ward
>

Tsk, Tsk. I knew that, Ward, just as well as I new that "and" does not
mean "a,"
but I typed it anyway. Just like I often type "there" for "their," and
"new" for "knew." It's called a "typo." You seem to be riding the "it's"
hobby horse pretty hard lately, though. Any particular reason? But thank
you for the reminder, and I will try to be more careful next time, but I
wont make any promise's <g>


From: "Dennis Hukel" <hukel@bhiinc.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 07:46:18 -0800

>It may be only wishful thinking, but my years of experience indicates to me
that Greek words put "into" other phrases
>was an emphasis of close association. [snip]
>This does not particularly involve the prominence of words in a sentence;
this involves how the words relate to each
>other. There is apparently some close connection between AUTHN and the
prepositional phrase EN TINI PARABOLHi which the
>author wants us to be aware of.

EN TINI AUTHN PARABOLHi QWMEN

Obviously, by definition of PARABOLHi, there is close association being
between the Kingdom and the parable he is going to use to describe it. But
the other cases of which I am aware of words "put into" other phrases
involves words which modify the head noun and are put in the attributive
rather than the predicate position. Hence, an adjective in the predicate
position

[article] [noun] [adjective]

"describes" the noun, but an adjective in the attributive position,
intervening between the article and noun, gives the description as an
"attribute" of the noun, and perhaps in that sense gives "an emphasis of
close association" between the attribute and the noun?

In the same way, types of modifying phrases other than adjectives might be
in the "attributive" rather than the "predicate" position, and as such
appear to be "put into" the noun phrase. For example, an intervening
prepositional phrase in Luk 16.10,

(1a) hO EN ELACISTWi ADIKOS, as opposed to (1b) hO PISTOS EN ELACISTWi
earlier in the verse;

an intervening clause, as in Heb 2.2,

(2a) hO DI' AGGELWN LALHQEIS LOGOS as opposed to, say, (2b) hO LOGOS hOS
LALHQEIS DI' AGGELWN;

an intervening participial clause, as in Act 17.19,

(3a) hH hUPO SOU LALOUMENH DIDACH, as opposed to (3b) hH DIDACH hUPO SOU
LALOUMENH.

In each of these cases, the "intervening" phrase or clause has some
grammatical relationship to the head noun -- in (2) and (3), a subordinate
clause to the head noun, moved into the attributive postion (thus filling
the
same slot as an adjective would), and in (1), a
prepositional phrase functioning like a subordinate clause.

Likewise, I can understand a genitive noun functioning this way, since the
genitive case is the way of grammatically linking one noun without a
preposition to another noun:

[article] [genitive noun] [head noun]

But an *accusative* noun stuck into a noun phrase? Are there other examples
of this, where the "intervening" material has no grammatical relation to the
head
noun? I don't currently have the tools for searching these kinds of
things out, but since I have jumped into this conversation, I am curious
enough to study it out further.

BTW, I am not sure about the notion that the (a) patterns above would signal
a closer relationship with the head noun than the (b) patterns, specifically
because of examples like Luk 16.10. It seems instead a difference in some
type of focus on the head noun itself versus "focus" on the attribute (or in
the
case of Luk 16.10, simply stylistic variation?)

Mark Beatty, I am glad to see that you have dealt with the issue of the
direction of head/specifier/complement in NTG. I want to read your
dissertation . . . *it's* been long enough since I've done X-bar syntax that
I'm kind of rusty, but ISTM that how a language sets those parameters would
have implications for what extent a language can manipulate word order to
signal prominence.

Enough rambling for one night!

glenn blank
Pensacola FL


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