If you have spent any time at this blog, you have probably heard me rant about the importance of presuppositions. I continue to be eternally thankful to Larry Perkins of ACTS who first beat that into my head, and to Christo Van der Merwe and Stephen Levinsohn for driving the point home. It is indeed a well-driven nail as Ecclesiastes 12:11 talks about. Believe me when I say I know about nails, I have driven hundred of thousands of them, unfortunately.

My blogging has been curtailed for the last little while as I am working on another paper , besides the HP and Hebrew discontinuity papers I am supposed to be writing. In the course of writing my HP paper, I had cause to go back and review the work cited by a scholar in support of his proposed theoretical framework. The article in question proved difficult to find, and I probably would have dropped it if Mike Aubrey had not showed up with it one day, photocopied and mailed by the author himself. That’s friendship and commitment, folks. Alas, I digress, but HT to Admiral Aubrey, net navigator and purveyor of rare antiquities.

In reading the original source, I found that the NT author had conflated symmetrical markedness with asymmetrical, not recognizing the meaningful difference between the two. For the full scoop, please check the markedness posts in the tag cloud, but here is a nutshell description. The asymmetrical view of markedness views the members of a set as unique (i.e. asymmetrical) and as each marking the presence of something. Typically, the most basic member of the set to be the default, the foil against which the others are described. The default is typically the one that occurs most frequently, but not always. The goal of the asymmetrical description is to delineate what each member of the set uniquely “marks” in contrast to the default.

I have discussed verbs in the past, so let’s take coordinating conjunctions. In narrative (other than John’s gospel), the most commonly occurring coordinate is και, and signals nothing more than the joining of two items of equal status–nouns, noun phrases, clauses, etc. In this sense, it is the unmarked member of the set since it does not add any particular constraint. Δε and γαρ are a different matter. They too join items of equal status, but each add a unique constraint that would not have been marked by the use of και. If you want  more of an explanation, see the conjunction chapter of the Discourse Grammar sample. So asymmetrical markedness is all about organizing members to isolate what each one uniquely marks as present.

Not so the symmetrical approach, at least in this particular formulation, is all about the hypothesized correlation between prominence and frequency. This hypothesis is more of a presupposition, one which you will rarely find openly discussed or supported. It is also the presupposition that has lead to the most confusion and misuse of markedness theory in NT studies. The symmetrical approach organizes the members of the set based on frequency, “semantic weighting”, morphological bulk, and so on. The organization is a hierarchical cline whereby the members are ranked in terms of their markedness. One can then use the cline to correlate the use of a member to its overall markedness within the set, with the more marked members having more prominence within the discourse.

So what I found was that at critical points, the person in question conflates the two approaches. Specifically, the scholar drew symmetrically-based claims from linguists who were using an asymmetrical approach to markedness. In other words, while they are talking about things like -s “marking” the plural in English, symmetrical claims were drawn from their work and applied to Greek to support markedness as prominence in the discourse. Not good, as it kills 3/4 of the support for the proposed framework.

Second, and more devastating, are recent developments in the field of pragmatics regarding the “Iconicity principle.” This principle forms the essential background for most symmetrical claims regarding markedness. Martin Haspelmath has provided a rather solid case in a series of articles that these iconicity-based claims are all derivatives of frequency rather than independent and separate corroborating factors. One could very appropriately call it the “Exegetical Fallacies” counterpart for markedness. What does this mean? It means that even if these original sources had not been conflated, the claims have been rendered moot as added independent corroboration of claims derived from frequency. Haspelmath  compelling demonstrates that the iconicity claims are simply reformulations of the same frequency-based claim. The main test for this is to substitute “frequency” when you see the word “marked.”

When you are doing your research, strive to do something more than “cite and run.” My last post concerned the problem of dismissive scholarship. If you are going to really engage those you are, well, engaging, it will take getting in to the key sources used by the other scholar. Doing so may change your mind about their work, it may confirm your own ideas. You will never know until you look. Do not assume that you completely understand the other side without some due diligence. Taking things for granted can bite you.

So boys and girls, do some Haspelmathing and substituting of “frequency” for markedness and see what you can find. As for me, I am going to set aside this can of worms until after the new year, and get back to what I should have been doing. I hereby drop the issue, at least until after SBL. Look for more content-based posts on the HP.

It’s Saturday morning, do you know where your presuppositions are?