JJ Miller is one of many that have noted the recent release of a doctoral dissertation from the Free University in Amsterdam, home Simon Dik and one of my external examiners. There is also a post by Mike Aubrey on the topic.
Bailey has published several articles on aspects of word order in the Hebrew Bible, but was quite pleased to see this dissertation. It seems that he relies heavily upon the work of Knud Lambrecht, particularly the work subsequent to his 1994 volume. I devote a section of a chapter of the Discourse Grammar to various approaches to analyzing the pragmatics governing the ordering of clause elements. I note that most everyone but Halliday rely on Lambrecht. He has made a significant contribution to describing the cognitive processes which affect the pragmatics, an element that is missing from older applications of Dik’s Functional Grammar.

Most significant is Bailey’s discussion of words like ιδου that are often considered interjections and translated woodenly. He argues that one of their functions is indicating sentence focus, introducing a brand new entity. I had been puzzling over this very same issue in my Hebrew analysis and had wanted some more info on the issue. Well, here it is.

While I highly recommend his work, Bailey’s work also reconfirms the fact that describing the pragmatic principles at work is a complex thing, not for the faint of heart. However, principle-driven approaches will fare far better despite their difficulty than oversimplifications using rule-based models derived from statistics. These may be simpler, but with good reason–they miss much of what is driven by the human processing of the text, the difference between what is presupposed and asserted in each clause. Since this changes with each clause as one reads the discourse, the mind is constantly updating the parameters used for making judgments. If it sounds too simple to be true, then be skeptical.

So if you are looking at a nice introduction to constituent order devoted to Greek, you will not find anything finer out there than Bailey’s work. The outline I provide is simply meant for an introduction, not to train you to do the analysis yourself. And for what it is worth, Lambrecht’s book was (and still is) the most difficult book that I have yet read.

Here is one other excerpt from JJ from Rich Rhodes of UC Berkley who served as external examiner on the committee:

We all recognized that Nick’s work has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of information flow in the NT. I’m pushing him to work on pulling the generalizations out of the welter of minor constructions he has cataloged, since it is expected that he will formally publish his findings.

We spent the afternoon after the defense talking about the family of constructions involving ίδου/ἴδε. We’ve heard these translated as behold for so long, that we have no clue that that’s not how most of them function in Koine at all. Read his Chapter 6 to see the breakdown.

Be sure to read the rest of the post about the ceremony of the event. Being there would have been a blast.