Advice on methodology - study on και

[Matthew Longhorn]

I have started putting together a study on the different uses of και in terms of construction grammar. Mainly something to keep me focussed in learning more about construction grammar and also Greek in the process.
Basically my approach at the moment is not a good one, but is a reasonable start - simply look in different English translations of the NT for the different glosses and start to put together a list. I recognise that using English translation to judge the meaning of a Greek word is not good practice. This would just be to get me the starting list to work through and analyse without hitting uses that are almost certainly best glossed as "and". It wouldn't be to necessarily agree with the glosses without thought. Next to work through the NT grammars as they relate to this, as well as the lexicons. Eventually I will need to read wider literature including classical Greek grammars. I have some work by Drummen to work through who does this approach in classical Greek texts.

My next step is probably going to be to take a few short books of the new testament e.g. Mark and perhaps some of the shorter epistles and look up every instance of και. Logos should give me the list for these books, just a case of then analysing each one.

I have no academic background, and this isn't intended to be an academic study but a way for me to learn. It is nice to have a project in my life again to get mildly obsessive about. Given this lack of academic background I am pretty clueless when it comes to research methodology, but might as well try to apply some basic principles if I can, rather than just be completely ad-hoc in my approach. Any thoughts on ways to approach this topic?

[Stephen Carlson]

I’m really in favor in picking a project to understand something better, and so I’m excited to see this.

My only demurral is that it is not clear that καί would be the best vehicle for probing construction grammar. It is very productive as a conjunction and its meaning is largely ***-compositional. Still there are some areas that can be explored: what kinds of constituents can be conjoined by καἰ? what about the adverbial καἰ? are there interactions with other particles, esp. with similar meanings (e.g., with τε and καὶ Χ δὲ … may be a construction)? So maybe there is some scope for discovery.

*** thinko corrected

[Matthew Longhorn]

Hey Stephen, thanks for the comments
My thoughts were along yours - work out what words it goes with in each sense (my feel at the moment is that following another discourse particle forces an adverbial sense, but that is just a feel),
where it appears in the clause, word order, use of singular vs plural verbs where more than one argument is joined, whether the verbal action can be interpreted as simultaneous or whether it has to be consecutive etc. It would also be interesting to see what pragmatic factors impact it outside do purely structural - the ascensive use would be good for this

The obvious pairing of τε και etc is going to be interesting. Tempting to do a similar study at the same time on τε to compare.

Likely about to show my ignorance, but isn’t non-compositionality one of the hallmarks of a construction?

[Stephen Carlson]

Likely about to show my ignorance, but isn’t non-compositionality one of the hallmarks of a construction?

Sorry, meant “compositional.” I’ll fix.

[Stephen Carlson]

Fillmore and Kay’s textbook on construction grammar is now freely available under a creative commons licence here: https://zenodo.org/record/4737707#.YY2AGi1XefA

[Matthew Longhorn]

Nice, thanks Stephen. Downloaded and dumped into my pdf library for future perusal.
I am working through this one at the moment. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1108455867? ... b_ap_share

Figured I could work through a number of different theories in construction grammar and see how they work out and which seems most beneficial. I found a tutor who worked on Sign Based Construction Grammar to help me learn and apply that book as well. Should be fun hopefully he can eventually get me through some dynamic syntax that thoroughly defeated me previously, much to my disgust.

Currently found 90 instances of και translated as “also” in the LSB and the ESV in Mark and Luke. Given that this is just something personal to work on and learn with I figured I could be forgiven the dodgy methodology. Will need to expand to some of the epistles as well, but I can start small and build up.
as a start I plan to categorise the location in the clause, the semantic roles of the arguments, the particles / prepositional phrases that are found with it. Slowly build up the data and see what comes out.