Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by cwconrad »

MAubrey wrote:
cwconrad wrote:Well, to be perfectly honest, Mike, I'd have to call that a quibble...
At this point, the pot is calling the kettle black.

If you were to look up "quibble" in your dictionary, you might just find your own post cited as an example!
We're talking about "I'm tempted to say ...", which I am more or less equating with "I'lll hazard a guess." How about equivocate? "My" dictionary (I don't claim ownership: it's the dictionary shipping with Apple's Mac OS):
use ambiguous language so as to conceal the truth or avoid committing oneself: [with direct speech] : “Not that we are aware of,” she equivocated.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4159
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by Jonathan Robie »

MAubrey wrote:
Jonathan Robie wrote:Does that mean that πνεύματός is less salient in the second variant? Or perhaps that ἁγίου is less salient in the first than in the second?
τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου
τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἁγίου ἐστιν
These days, I would take the position of ἐστιν here as signaling where the sentence accent is by its attachment position. I'm tempted to suggest it could be that Bezae is treating πνεύματός ἁγίου as a more closely lexicalized construction than the non-Bezae variant.
OK, but that doesn't actually say much about what the first variant means. Sure, Bezae might have seen πνεύματός ἁγίου as a unit that should not be interrupted, but that doesn't explain why the first variant interrupts a noun phrase with a verb. Any thoughts on that part?

There are over 11,000 prepositional phrases in the GNT. Fewer than 150 have discontinuities - and many of these are false positives, I haven't picked through them to classify them yet. So if choice implies meaning, I would expect this to be meaningful, because it's a fairly rare thing to do.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote:
MAubrey wrote:
Jonathan Robie wrote:Does that mean that πνεύματός is less salient in the second variant? Or perhaps that ἁγίου is less salient in the first than in the second?
τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου
τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἁγίου ἐστιν
These days, I would take the position of ἐστιν here as signaling where the sentence accent is by its attachment position. I'm tempted to suggest it could be that Bezae is treating πνεύματός ἁγίου as a more closely lexicalized construction than the non-Bezae variant.
OK, but that doesn't actually say much about what the first variant means. Sure, Bezae might have seen πνεύματός ἁγίου as a unit that should not be interrupted, but that doesn't explain why the first variant interrupts a noun phrase with a verb. Any thoughts on that part?
I'm afraid this thread has gotten side-tracked by the merits of educated guessing and an aggressive exegesis of the English term "tempted." Let's take a step back. (Let me also point out that πνεύματός ἁγίου has a stray acute on the last syllable of πνεύματος due to from moving words around in the editor without adjusting for the change of accent due to the differing placement of the enclitic ἐστιν. This is actually important.)

It is important to recognize that ἐστιν is an enclitic and it follows the usual rules for placement for enclitics. At least according to the line of research Mike and I have been following for the past couple of years (but going way back to Wackernagel in the 19th century), the rules for placement of clausal enclitics are governed more by the phonology of the utterance than the semantics. In general, a clausal enclitic will be pronounced after the first full accent in its domain. Here, one analysis is that the relevant domain is ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου, with τὸ ... ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν as an extra-clausal constituent (with a topicalizing function). (I believe Mike prefers to talk of where the sentence accent falls instead, but this analysis is equivalent in this case and the differences in other clauses is not interesting to discuss in this context.) Since the enclitic ἐστιν wants to be pronounced after the first full accent, it is going to be hosted by ἐκπνεύματος. In fact, it is even going to incorporate itself into the first phonological word and shift the accent of the word group to the right in accordance with the Law of Limitation as ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν. (Note that the firstly written acute is a ghost due to a spelling convention, the actual accent falls on the penult.) As a result, it is not that ἐστιν somehow "interrupts" the prepositional phrase: as an enclitics it goes where it is supposed to go. This is just the ordinary Classical Greek placement of clausal clitics.

What's interesting is that the scribe of D has a different order, ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου ἐστιν, with ἐστιν at the end, after the second acute. This suggests that ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου is intoned a bit differently, perhaps as ἐκ πνεὺματος ἁγίου, using a grave to mark a suppressed accent. Such a phrasing is indicative of that the two-word collocation is moving closer to becoming a compound word, governed under a single lexical accent. Since he's writing the 5th cen. and may not be a native L1 speaker, there are a couple of possible reasons for that. I don't think that D's scribe is signalling here a different understanding of the sentence, but rather that he phrases the term for Holy Spirit differently, more as a unit.
Jonathan Robie wrote:There are over 11,000 prepositional phrases in the GNT. Fewer than 150 have discontinuities - and many of these are false positives, I haven't picked through them to classify them yet. So if choice implies meaning, I would expect this to be meaningful, because it's a fairly rare thing to do.
Well, you need to establish that it is a question of choice. In this case, it could be a question of phonology, with different people at different times in history intoning the same phrase in different ways. Not every pronunciation difference implies a semantic different (e.g., "either" in English as "EE-ther" or "EYE-ther). In fact, they usually don't, thought there may be some sociolinguistic implications.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4159
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by Jonathan Robie »

This is really helpful, Stephen. Thanks. It makes sense to me.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Jonathan Robie
Posts: 4159
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:34 pm
Location: Durham, NC
Contact:

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen, Mike, others ... how do you understand the placement of ἐστιν in Matthew 7:9?
ἢ τίς ἐστιν ἐξ ὑμῶν ἄνθρωπος, ὃν αἰτήσει ὁ υἱὸς αὐτοῦ ἄρτον— μὴ λίθον ἐπιδώσει αὐτῷ;
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote:Stephen, Mike, others ... how do you understand the placement of ἐστιν in Matthew 7:9?
ἢ τίς ἐστιν ἐξ ὑμῶν ἄνθρωπος, ὃν αἰτήσει ὁ υἱὸς αὐτοῦ ἄρτον— μὴ λίθον ἐπιδώσει αὐτῷ;
Here ἐστιν is also enclitic, pronouned after the accented interrogative pronoun τίς as expected. The conjunction ἤ does not count for position and did not carry an accent as its grave accent probably indicates.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
RandallButh
Posts: 1105
Joined: May 13th, 2011, 4:01 am

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by RandallButh »

Stephen Carlson wrote:
Jonathan Robie wrote:Stephen, Mike, others ... how do you understand the placement of ἐστιν in Matthew 7:9?
ἢ τίς ἐστιν ἐξ ὑμῶν ἄνθρωπος, ὃν αἰτήσει ὁ υἱὸς αὐτοῦ ἄρτον— μὴ λίθον ἐπιδώσει αὐτῷ;
Here ἐστιν is also enclitic, pronouned after the accented interrogative pronoun τίς as expected. The conjunction ἤ does not count for position and did not carry an accent as its grave accent probably indicates.

Here is where strict phonology may need to be coupled with pragmatics. The ἐστιν could have been placed in other positions but would have changed the pragmatics. By placing ἐστιν next to the τίς, the τίς is separated out and further heightened (focused), probably because it is intended to carry a rhetorical-pragmatic effect, negativity in this case. Who? None.
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by Stephen Carlson »

RandallButh wrote:Here is where strict phonology may need to be coupled with pragmatics. The ἐστιν could have been placed in other positions but would have changed the pragmatics. By placing ἐστιν next to the τίς, the τίς is separated out and further heightened (focused), probably because it is intended to carry a rhetorical-pragmatic effect, negativity in this case. Who? None.
Perhaps it's a chicken-and-egg thing, but I see it working in the other direction: as different words are emphasized for pragmatic effect, they will affect the placement of the little words like the enclitic ἐστιν in their wake.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
RandallButh
Posts: 1105
Joined: May 13th, 2011, 4:01 am

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by RandallButh »

Stephen Carlson wrote:
RandallButh wrote:Here is where strict phonology may need to be coupled with pragmatics. The ἐστιν could have been placed in other positions but would have changed the pragmatics. By placing ἐστιν next to the τίς, the τίς is separated out and further heightened (focused), probably because it is intended to carry a rhetorical-pragmatic effect, negativity in this case. Who? None.
Perhaps it's a chicken-and-egg thing, but I see it working in the other direction: as different words are emphasized for pragmatic effect, they will affect the placement of the little words like the enclitic ἐστιν in their wake.
Yes, marked focal elements will attract and be underlined by the attracted enclitic.

But while τίς comes with an obligatory first position** as inherently focal, you must still explain/process/interpret the positioning of ἐστιν because it is not automatic with τίς.
for example:
Matt 10:11 τίς ἐν αὐτῇ ἄξιός ἐστιν·
Matt 18:1 τίς ἄρα μείζων ἐστὶν ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν;
Mark 4:41 τίς ἄρα οὗτός ἐστιν ὅτι καὶ ὁ ἄνεμος καὶ ἡ θάλασσα ὑπακούει αὐτῷ;
Luke 5:21 τίς ἐστιν οὗτος ὃς λαλεῖ βλασφημίας;
Luke 7:49 τίς οὗτός ἐστιν ὃς καὶ ἁμαρτίας ἀφίησιν;

Note Luke, among the others.

If you want to explain these as having a two-tiered focus, primary and secondary focus, with accompanying intonational marking differences, I would be happy.

**(obligatory first position is not completely obligatory):
Rom 9:20 ὦ ἄνθρωπε, μενοῦνγε σὺ τίς εἶ ὁ ἀνταποκρινόμενος τῷ θεῷ;,14:4 σὺ τίς εἶ ὁ κρίνων ἀλλότριον οἰκέτην; show τίς preceded by a Contextualizing Constituent (pragmatically marked Topic preceding a Focus).
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Word Order: Y2 Hyperbaton in Matthew 1:20

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Yeah with οὗτος, there are more focal points for attracting intonations and opportunities for enclitic attachment.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Post Reply

Return to “Pragmatics and Discourse”