Comments on: The trouble with clines 2, SFL-III

By: Steve Runge

Steve Runge — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:15:42 +0000

If I am semantically required to do something to “provide the meaning needed for the listener to tell who I’m talking about,” then there is no pragmatic decision involved. If I have to do something, can it be considered a choice? The utterance has meaning, but there are no pragmatic decisions regarding the use of a specially marked form compared to the normal, unmarked one. See the posts introducing markedness for more of an explanation.

By: Paul Gibbs

Paul Gibbs — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:22:45 +0000

“Choice implies meaning. Unless there is some viable pragmatic choice involved in making a linguistic decision, it is illegitimate to assign some special meaning to its use. If I have no choice but to use third person in writing a narrative, there is nothing to be claimed about its use.”

I suppose the SFL approach would say that your choice of third person provides the meaning needed for the listener to tell who you’re talking about. You chose “her”: not explicitly yourself, and not explictly me–so you “mean” someone else. The selection of person provides important interpersonal data within the context of communication. And, conveniently, “interpersonal” here is actually one of the three main SFL “metafunctions”–the various types of meaning embedded in linguistic events.

By: Steve Runge

Steve Runge — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:19:01 +0000

Benjamin, I think that your point is valid with regard to proving or disproving something with statistics. They provide a helpful baseline, but little more. Your comments reflect the points I made in the review of Ivan Kwong's work in the comment above. But at some point, if extended too far, your point breaks down. Though there are different authors with different styles, they are all speaking the same language, even Mark! My point is that a suitable description of a grammatical device should work just as well in high-falutin' Luke as it does in John or Revelation. This was part of the motivation for making the LDGNT analysis comprehensive of the GNT, to make sure it could really account for everything. Revelation was pretty straight-forward, it was Peter and 2 Corinthians that caused me fits in places. Languages have rules that are followed and are even exploited for pragmatic reasons. Statistics lacks the ability to filter out the pragmatic noise to get to the core principles and rules, in many cases. It also takes a solid typological understanding of how languages work, not just hypothesizing idiosyncrasies of Greek or John. Stephen Levinsohn once adjured me that if I claimed the something occurred in Koine that is not found in any other language, then I was probably wrong. I have done the research for the grammar, and can demonstrate that the devices I am claiming are present and accomplish comparable functions in other languages. To paraphrase a quote from F. Danker, "Linguistics is not for sissies."

By: Benjamin Shaw

Benjamin Shaw — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:33:54 +0000

Dear Steve: A very useful post. Off the top of my head, at least three practical considerations are ignored by such a dependence on statistics. The first is that the New Testament itself is a pretty small sample from which to work. The second is that the problem is made worse by the fact that the NT was written by a variety of authors, each with his own style, so that what might statistically be true of Luke probably isn’t true of John. Third, there is the consideration of genre. So that what might be true of John’s style in his Gospel probably isn’t true in the epistles (which are so short as to be statistically meaningless), and certainly isn’t true of Revelation (which I think John wrote, but which to my mind can’t be proven or disproven statistically).

By: Steve Runge

Steve Runge — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:06:17 +0000

Good point, Mike. It was beyond long anyhow, but there is no shortage of similar examples. For those not aware of Ivan Kwong's work, he applied a symmetrical cline of markedness to word order combinations in Luke. My RBL review of his book can be read here.

By: Carl Conrad

Carl Conrad — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:40:02 +0000

What a splendid and useful discussion! Several reactions come to mind:
(1) Re: statistics. I can recall, while working in a faculty committee on B.A. curricular requirements, arguing over whether History belongs with Social Science on grounds that History increasingly relies upon statistics) or with Humanities, William Gass (the novelist & poet) averred that even Mathematics belongs to the Humanities. Academics are all too prone to imagine that if you can bring measurement into a discipline, what you are saying is more scientific and less subjective. But do they know where their presuppositions are?
(2) I don’t have the statistics to prove it (of course!), but I’m particularly skeptical about assertions made regarding Perfect and Pluperfect vs. Aorist; I think these “tenses” are in the process of fusing in the Koine, and that some choices between them are not necessarily significant.

By: Mike Aubrey

Mike Aubrey — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:30:14 +0000

I’m thinking Kwong would have been a good example here.