More and more scholars claim to be using linguistics and/or discourse analysis in their work. Most often it means they are using something other than a traditional grammatical approach, or that they are borrowing concepts from the other disciplines. Such work can be a real boon to research; it has absolutely revolutionized my work as a scholar. But there is a much-overlooked downside to adopting approaches foreign to your native field. Some fields lend themselves well to quick adoption, such as literary or rhetorical studies. To be sure, Koine Greek has its idiosyncrasies; but Greek literature has done much to influence Western ideas about literature and argumentation. In other words, we often have sufficient background from English to readily understand the basic ground rules from a secondary field.1 Other fields are not so forgiving.
I did some preliminary reading into social-scientific approaches to understanding NT cultural backgrounds last summer, and was rather surprised at how simply some matters were handled. Authors seemed to have little awareness that the first century setting was more milieu than monolithic. Some acted as though shame/honor considerations outweighed all others, rather than forming one of several influences. There was little effort to weigh conflicting values; matters were all black and white. Markus Bockmuehl‘s comments from a review confirmed some red flags I saw:
As a result, astounding generalizations proliferate, seemingly unsupported by evidence and reminiscent of grand anthropological theories of a bygone day, when Polynesian cargo cults could be thought to shed the same inexhaustible light on the social realities of Steeple Bumpstead as of ancient Xanadu. We hear about what is characteristically, and it appears timelessly, ‘Mediterranean’ behaviour. But for every valid or at least plausible insight one stumbles over others burdened with rather too many unmentioned exceptions, be they ancient or modern or both. All the while, the cultural stereotypes merrily accumulate to an extent that would be unthinkable if the object were contemporary ‘African’ or ‘native American’ people groups.2
What was the problem? Although the volume provided useful information about the issues, it lacked the sophistication needed to help the reader appropriately apply the principles. I realize this sounds a little snotty, the very kind of thing that I detest about academia. However, if some claim will lead you astray because it is underdeveloped or simplistic, there is indeed room for critique. I have learned over the years that most of the academic hallmarks (like harsh critiques) play an important role, so long as they are executed properly. There are indeed snotty reviews that do little to advance our understanding.
Increasingly I am seeing people wanting to go off and explore new territory, but often they are ill-equipped to do so. This is my sense with Porter’s work. He sought to disprove the presence of tense in Greek, and to develop a framework that understood verbal aspect as conveying prominence essentially as a semantic property. This is exactly what he did in Verbal Aspect, and more recently he has expanded the application of this prominence model to areas besides the verb. But my blog posts have questioned his understanding of concepts that are foundational to his model. These include markedness, grounding and prominence.
Another academic hallmark–peer review–is supposed to safeguard against the kinds of problems I raised in my paper about Porter’s methodology. In other words, if there had been linguists involved in the reviews, his misunderstanding of these concepts would have been challenged (and ideally corrected) much earlier. Peer review assumes that while one person may err, having a second or third pair of eyes coming at it from a different perspective should bring to light problems that need to be addressed. While this works in theory, there are problems in practice. If none of the reviewers were qualified linguists who were experts in the relevant secondary literature, then flaws in this area are much less likely to be caught.
Interdisciplinary study is a mixed blessing. It can be a great help, but it can also be your undoing. If you have not gone far enough into the secondary field to gain the needed competence, you open yourself to catastrophe. Even if people accept your ideas in the short run, they will not stand the test of time if they are ill-formed.
- This is not to say that literary or rhetorical approaches cannot be abused, just to say it is less likely than other more technical fields. [↩]
- Marcus Bockmuehl, “Review of Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Third Edition, Revised and Expanded. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 256. ISBN 0-664-22295-1.)” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2002.04.19 (2002). [↩]
On Wednesday morning I delivered a paper that summarized two of the three findings regarding the theoretical model Stanley Porter uses to support his prominence-based model of aspect. The basic finding is that his sources do not support some of most important claims.
There are some key things to keep in mind. First, he has erroneously framed the debate about the Greek verbal system as though one must chose between two absolute categories: tense or aspect. The problem is a bit more complex than that, as outlined in my paper.
Another important distinction to be made is between arguing that aspect is present in the language (which most everyone does), and Porter’s prominence claims outlined in his “planes of discourse” model. His model must be seen as distinct from aspect. I argue for viewing Greek as a mixed system, best described as aspect-prominent. This means that although tense is present (only in the indicative), we should not be surprised that aspectual considerations trump the temporal ones. Robertson describes the quandry this way:
Because of this difference between the indicative and the other moods in the matter of time some grammars give a separate treatment to the indicative tenses. It is not an easy matter to handle, but to separate the indicative perhaps accents the element of time unduly. Even in the indicative the time element is subordinate to the kind of action expressed. A double idea thus runs through tense in the indicative (kind of action, time of the action). 1, 825.))
My general position on the verbal system is best outlined in my historical present paper delivered last year at SBL.
The paper that I link to is the shorter one read at the conference, not the article version that I will submit for publication. The latter is still being reviewed by some peers. Based on the seriousness of the issues, I do not want to post it prematurely.
If you are disturbed by my claims, I would urge you to read the core articles yourself. Regarding grounding and contrastive substitution, read Wallace. For a general overview of grounding, read Dry:
Wallace, Stephen. “Figure and Ground: The Interrelationships of Linguistic Categories.” In Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics, edited by Paul J. Hopper, 201–223. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1982.
Dry, Helen A. “Foregrounding: An Assessment.” In Language in Context: Essays for Robert E. Longacre, edited by Shin Ja J Hwang and William R Merrifield, 435–50. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1992. [Link]
- A.T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research ( (Logos, 1919; 2006 [↩]
This is a follow-up post to yesterday’s. After a four month summer break, I have gotten a little foggy about the protocol. I neglected to consult Porter’s “Prominence” article to see how he treated the idea of semantic markedness in his most recent work. It turns out he has changed his views somewhat.
First, he changes terminology from semantic to cognitive, commenting in note 37, “I use the term cognitive markedness rather than semantic markedness to specify that the markedness is formally based but concerned with the complexity of the notions involved. There is clear overlap with the notion of semantics.”1 He still uses Zwicky as his primary citation on markedness, though he refers readers to Givόn and Andrews. I’ll tackle the latter when I discuss frequency, but he cites pages 136-39 from Andrews’ “Myths about Markedness” chapter, seemingly as support! Why my surprise? On the cited pages, she in fact argues against the efficacy of the statistically-based model Porter uses. Why Porter cites her counter-argument–yet without engaging it–is a little baffling. Andrews’ comments about statistics may be read here on Google books. Since he has cited it, I’d encourage you to read it.
Later on the same page, Porter defines cognitive markedness: “Cognitive markedness indicates that the elements that have more precisely defined cognitive features are those that have greater markedness (e.g. genitive over other cases).”2 This sounds similar to Comrie’s discussion, but is much more vague. No sources are provided in support. At the opening of the section that discusses matters of markedness, he cites Martin Haspelmath’s “Against Markedness (and what to Replace it with),” but without engaging it at all.3 Might have been good if he did, as Haspelmath builds a convincing case against the legitimacy of among other things–you guessed it–cognitive/semantic markedness. Haspelmath’s article is available here in full-text, and I would strongly encourage you to read it for yourself. I’ll cover some of his arguments in an upcoming post, but he demonstrates that the four distinct kinds of markedness on which Porter’s entire theoretical framework is built are all actually better understood as derivatives of frequency, and thus do not provide the independent corroboration that Porter claims. I don’t understand his rationale for including it, but since he did I’d encourage you to read it.
Return to On Porter, Prominence and Aspect.
- Stanley E. Porter, “Prominence: An Overview,” in The Linguist as Pedagogue (edited by Stanley E Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, 45-74. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2009), 56. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Ibid., 55. See Martin Haspelmath, “Against Markedness (and what to Replace it with),” Journal of Linguistics (2006), 42:1:25-70. [↩]
This continues a series on Markedness and Verbal Aspect devoted to comparing Porter’s claims derived from the linguistic literature against what the linguists themselves say about the matter. I only rely upon the sources he cites, no new data is introduced. I have already demonstrated that he fundamentally misunderstands the grounding literature (i.e. foreground/background, see posts beginning here), deriving conclusions that lack any basis in his cited sources .
You might ask, “Who cares? Why does it matter?” Porter’s entire theoretical framework about the prominence of the Greek verbal aspects relies upon four supposedly different kinds of markedness: material, implicational, distributional and semantic .1 If his understanding of these concepts is wrong, then his entire theoretical framework is in jeopardy, a house of cards. Back in May I discussed the first two types of markedness (here) , and will tackle semantic markedness is this present post.
Porter claims the work of Zwicky and Comrie as his authorities on markedness.2 Porter never really defines what he means by semantic markedness, but makes the following statement in regard to what can be gleaned from it:
In chapt. 2, four different analogies are drawn–verbal opposition, conceptual description, planes of discourse, systemic framework–to describe the semantic markedness of the individual verb forms. Through each one it can be seen that the Aorist is the less heavily marked verb form in the Present/Imperfect opposition, and the least heavily marked when the perfect is also considered.3
Note that he describes semantic markedness quantitatively, as though each aspect has some numerical value derived from the factors he discusses. Porter’s quantitative understanding is unique in that the linguists he cites understand markedness to be qualitative in nature. He understands them to be talking about the amount of marking that is present, inferring without any support from the literature that the amount of markedness present is directly proportional to the form’s prominence.
It is important to note that Zwicky and Comrie are conducting typological studies to find the most basic forms in language compared to the other members of the set. They are interested in the presence or absence of markers, not in totaling them up to establish one form as more semantically marked than another. See the posts covering this idea here and here.
Zwicky and Comrie appear to be talking about something fundamentally different than Porter in their discussion of semantic markedness. We begin with Comrie’s treatment, since it informs Zwicky’s ideas to some extent.
Comrie explains his interest in markedness for the study of verbal aspect by noting:
The intuition behind the notion of markedness in linguistics is that, where we have an opposition with two or more members (e.g. perfective versus imperfective), it is often the case that one member of the opposition is felt to be more usual, more normal, less specific than the other (in markedness terminology, it is unmarked, the others are marked).4
After noting that one cannot rely on intuition alone for such decisions, Comrie proposes using the following criteria: semantic, morphological, and statistical markedness, describing the first one in this way: “One of the most decisive criteria is that, in many cases, the meaning of the unmarked category is always optional, i.e. where the unmarked category can always be used, even in a situation where the marked category would also be appropriate.”5 He cites Italian and Spanish as representative examples wherein the progressive/imperfective forms have a similar meaning to English, “however in Spanish and Italian these forms can always, without excluding progressive meaning, be replaced by the non-Progressive forms scrivo, escribo, whereas in English changing I am writing to I write necessarily involves a shift to nonprogressive meaning.”6 He notes the same is often true in most Slavonic languages, but not identical.
What does Comrie mean by semantic markedness? He is referring to instances where one member of a set may be used e.g. for either perfective or impefective action. It is only with the use of the marked member that the exact meaning is disambiguated. The unmarked member lacks a marker to signal which meaning is intended. The marked form, therefore, has a more specific meaning.
Zwicky, Porter’s primary source for markedness, devotes only eight sentences to semantic markedness in “On Markedness in Morphology”7 He uses nouns as examples, noting the various options for referring to the general concept of horse in English. Mare, stallion, and filly are each more specific than horse, but horse may appropriately be used to refer to any one of these three. Horse is unmarked for age or gender, whereas mare and stallion are marked for gender (female and male, respectively); whereas filly is marked for both gender and age (i.e. a young female horse).
When these linguists talk about semantic markedness, they are describing a general/specific relation that exists in the language. They are referring to an unmarked form that can be used for a general reference, whereas another, more specific form (the marked one) may also be used to disambiguate which specific thing is intended. The unmarked progressive in Spanish and Italian may have either a progressive or non-progressive meaning. There is no marker present to specify which is intended. Based on the congruity of the examples, they are clearly talking about the same concept. The same cannot be said of Porter’s conception. Although Porter cites Zwicky and Comrie as primary sources for markedness, his conception of semantic markedness bears no resemblance to their discussion of the matter.
Here is where it gets interesting. Porter has claimed that the aorist tense-form is the least semantically marked form in Greek. According to Comrie and Zwicky’s conception of semantic markedness, we would expect that a perfective form could be used with some other meaning than perfective being possible, i.e. a stative or imperfective meaning. Furthermore, we would expect that an imperfective or stative form could appropriately be substituted in the same context without fundamentally changing the meaning; it should match one of the possible meanings when a perfective was used. In other words, the aorist form should include the other meanings of the marked forms. However, Comrie himself points out that this is not the case in Ancient Greek:
The application of this particular criteria to many other aspectual oppositions such as Progressive/non-Progressive in English or the Simple Past/Imperfect in Spanish, or the Aorist/Imperfect distinction in Ancient Greek (and those Slavonic languages that retain these forms) is more problematic, since the usual pattern here is for the categories to be mutually exclusive, i.e. the replacement of the Aorist by an Imperfect or vice versa usually implies a different meaning altogether, not merely loss of some information by use of an unmarked category. It is generally, though not universally, assumed that in Romance and Slavonic languages, and in Georgian, it is the Aorist (Simple Past) that is the unmarked member of the Aorist/Imperfect opposition, but the possibility cannot be excluded that we are here dealing with two equally marked members of an equipollent opposition. 8
So what does this mean? To begin with, Porter must be using semantic markedness in some other sense than Comrie or Zwicky, yet without stating so. If he is using the same meaning, it should have been clear from Comrie’s work that any claim of semantic markedness in Greek would be invalid, based on the change of meaning that comes about with the change in aspect. Greek does not manifest the same unmarked freedom of usage described in the examples from Spanish and Italian aspect or from the English horse.
Comrie’s note about Greek’s equipollent marking of aspect (i.e., that each form distinctly marks a different aspect, as opposed to one being unmarked like Spanish or Italian) was not lost on Porter, as he actually makes the very same claim! Porter states,
There is no apparent evidence that in Greek any of the verbal aspects is semantically unmarked (contra Haberland, “Note,” 182). In fact, this work argues that even within the binary oppositions all members contribute semantic weight to the verbal component of the clause. Greek verbal aspect, therefore, appears to function on the basis of equipollent binary oppositions, in which each aspect is not identically weighted, at the least each contributes semantically in an identifiable way (see Fredrich, “Theory,” S14) [sic].9
If this claim is true regarding equipollency–and I would agree that it is–there is absolutely no basis for Porter to make claims about semantic markedness of the kind described by Comrie and Zwicky. If he intends to make it on some other grounds, where is the justification for it?
At the end of this quote, Porter mentions the notion of “semantic weight.” This is yet another theoretical concept that appears to originate from Porter to justify a quantitative understanding of these criteria (see here for more on this matter). The equipollent marking means that each form uniquely signals the presence of a distinct set of non-overlapping semantic features. According to his own literature used to support his discussion, there are no legitimate grounds for claiming semantic markedness as a valid criteria for Koine Greek.
I am not really sure how to conclude this post, other than to say that Porter’s use of the linguistic literature bizarre; semantic markedness is yet another of the four theoretical pillars on which he argues for his theory of aspectual prominence, yet the literature he cites for support actually argues against it. For semantic markedness to be a valid criteria for use in Greek, Porter would need to argue that at least in the case of the Aorist the aspectual system is not equipollent.
I repeat the assertion with which I began this series:
There was a curious comment from Moises Silva that will function as my point of departure. He states:
I suppose that this problem lies behind a curious thing. In general terms, I found Porter’s theoretical framework more convincing than Fanning’s.1 Fanning is, I think, much too generous in his attempt to salvage what he can out of the traditional grammars; while I commend him in the attempt (it needs to be done), the result is a certain instability. On the other hand, when it came to looking at their implementation of the principles, I had many more problems with Porter than with Fanning: time and time again I failed to see either the logic or the evidence for his interpretations. I am not ready to suggest that we adopt Porter’s explanation of the linguistic system and Fanning’s interpretation of actual occurrences. My point is only that some important inconsistencies remain in the field as a whole, and that we all need to clarify more precisely what we are trying to do.2
At the risk of incurring the boundless wrath of one Esteban Vasquez, I will merely add to the “Infallible One’s” point (with gentleness and respect no less) rather than disagree with it. Here is the key thing to recognize: if there are problems with the implementation, then there are likely problems in the theoretical framework that guided the implementation.
I think Silva was onto something far bigger than he may have known at the time. If you have problems or doubts regarding the claims I am making here, read Porter’s primary sources for yourself. Too many NT scholars have uncritically accepted his claims without testing them against the linguistic literature. You need not go any further than Porter’s own sources to find evidence against his claims. His basic definitions and classifications of the Greek tense-forms are sound, I have affirm these things myself. But his claims regarding their backgrounding/foregrounding/frontgrounding function, regarding their prominence value on the basis of markedness, are discredited by the very sources he cites in support of them.
One more post remains to finish this series before I submit the findings for publication and present them at ETS in Atlanta.
Return to On Porter, Prominence and Aspect.
- See Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament: With Reference to Tense and Mood (Studies in Biblical Greek 1. New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 179-181. [↩]
- Ibid., 89. [↩]
- Ibid., 181. [↩]
- Bernard Comrie, .Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 111. [↩]
- Ibid., 112. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Arnold M. Zwicky, “On Markedness in Morphology,” Die Sprache (Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft Wien 24, no. 2 , 1978), 130-31. [↩]
- Comrie, 113-114. [↩]
- Porter, Verbal Aspect, 90. [↩]
I have gotten emails from folks who have so appreciated what discourse grammar has to offer that they ask whether we still need traditional grammars. I tried to explain here the need and role for each approach, but there seems to be a tendency to throw out the old when some new, promising thing comes along. The question seems to be, if I am advocating for discourse grammar, then how can I possibly still support tradition approaches? Let me tell you a little story as an answer to this question.
The other day I found some chapter outlines and notes from the planning stages of A Discourse Grammar from 2003-04. They brought back memories. My ideas developed a lot over the years, but the purpose remained the same: to provide an accessible introduction to discourse studies–as free of jargon as possible–for those who had more of a traditional grammatical background. This was the goal, but it proved to be more difficult than I thought. Regarding the terminology, there were certain points that demanded retention of jargon for clarity sake. New concepts demanded new terms, there was no way around it.
But there was another problem. How was I to reach out to those familiar Wallace or Robertson when I was unfamiliar with them. My exposure to ideas of semantic force was limited, intentionally so on my part. All of the categories drove me crazy, mainly because they did not help me better understand the Greek. This should not have come as a surprise since they are merely descriptive labels, not intended to provide explanation. At any rate, I wanted to find more of a holistic methodology for describing grammatical usage, if nothing else to compliment what I felt was rather atomistic. Wallace’s volume was released the year after I completed seminary, and I had no interest in reading the “dead grammarians” like Robertson, Winer and BDF. What did they have that I needed, I had discourse! Or so my thinking went
I was called on the carpet several times for my snobbish disdain for traditional grammar on three separate occasions at ISBL in Edinburgh in July, 2006. Twice it was by folks from traditional backgrounds, and once–from of all people–by Stephen Levinsohn. You see, in my pursuit of discourse studies, I tended to criticize the shortcomings of traditional approaches as a means of arguing for the need for discourse-based approaches. Yes, I carried the banner that said “Discourse studies hold the answer to everything.” I had drunk the Kool-aid, it seemed.
Not surprisingly, much of my criticism stemmed from ignorance. What kind, you ask? The kind where you don’t completely engage the opposition, you simply interact enough to find the flaws. Flaws can be found on all sides in such matters, I learned. Several scholars, quite independently of one another, beat it into my thick skull that there is no perfect methodology or approach. Each has its own strengths. The further one attempts to extend beyond the core strength, the more its weaknesses are exposed. This was the case with exegetical grammar. It provided helpful descriptions at the lower levels of discourse in most cases. But the higher the level at which a given device operated, the more the solutions provided tended to stumble. Thus, the first lesson I took away from these exchanges was essentially “Know thyself,” i.e. know the limitations of my approach. I found that I did not, a hard but good thing to learn.
Another important thing I gleaned from these unpleasant interactions was a corollary: “Know your neighbor.” I learned rather clearly that I did not. Oh sure, I knew enough straw-man their ideas, but did I understand them enough to appreciate them, enough to engage them on their own terms? Nope, not even close. Why not? Laziness on my part, along with some arrogance. You see, I didn’t think that they had anything to offer me. Boy, was I ever wrong.
I was specifically challenged to immerse myself in traditional grammar. I was told that there I would find a treasure trove of insights into the Greek language, things that I would likely never learn otherwise. I also learned more specifically what my “problem” was with their approach. In most cases, it was really a matter of wanting a more efficient, synthesis-based description of the device. Their descriptions most often tended to obscure function or subdivide the same basic device into separate categories. There were times some descriptions may have approached inaccuracy, but these were much rarer than my rhetoric would have let on.
I was not the happiest of campers on my flight home from Edinburgh. As much as I like to view myself as growing older and wiser, I had clearly seen that there was more young and stupid that needed to be addressed. Worse yet, it was going to take mastering an entire new body of literature with a horrifically profuse fair amount of jargon. Not unlike Paul heading off to Arabia after his encounter on the Damascus road, I slowly began reprogramming my attitudes toward traditional grammarians by getting to know them personally. For the next two years I read their writings whenever I could.
Quite honestly, the reading was done grudgingly and under compulsion, but these guys began to grow on me. What’s more, I was surprised by what I was finding. As I had been warned told, these guys knew their stuff. They were making connections to ideas or devices that I had never thought of before. I also found out that they were looking at many of the same kinds of phenomena as I was. The problem was that they had a very limited descriptive framework within which to operate. Most relied on analogy to English or Latin for description. If English had a more specific means of accomplishing a task, a blended description was used combining the English and Greek. The description was often based on its translation value. In many cases this worked just fine. But where there were mismatches in the language, or where the device operated at a higher level of discourse, descriptions suffered.
Somewhere in the course of this reading I began to realize what sort of book was needed. It was not another “Bash the dead grammarians because they are wrong,” there was already too much of that. What was worse was that these books that bashed them for their backward terminology often did little more than replace it with a new kind of backward, something that was just as inaccessible even if it was supposedly more precise.
What was needed was a book that engaged the dead grammarians as masters of the language in most cases, but whose descriptions suffered from the limitations of their descriptive framework at certain points. This meant that these men were no longer my enemies. Instead, they were my mentors. What was needed was helping others see what these learned men saw, but sometimes had trouble describing. This would require clear explanations of both the devices and the principles or presupposition on which they relied. It also necessitated engaging the dead grammar on their own terms, working within their jargon to demonstrate that they were arguing for the same kind of function as I was, just using a different descriptive framework.
This proved to be a bigger challenge than I expected. It was far more difficult to master this literature than I expected, nor have I finished this task. One of the most surprising challenges was overcoming my prejudice against their explanations as wrong or backwards. Old habits die hard, and unfortunately there is still some life to be found in these attitudes of mine. Worse yet, some of this attitude made its way into the text of the discourse grammar. As much as I admired their work, I found myself getting frustrated when they would be so close to getting it right clearly describing what was going on, but the predisposition towards atomization or translation-based explanations got in the way. There was also the old “show how smart I am by making them look dumb” approach that crops up.
I have come a long way, but still am maturing as a scholar. In making my final editing pass, I managed to strike a number of comments along these lines, but knew some remained. I cannot thank Carl Conrad enough for his willingness to joust with me over my explanations, pointing out flaws and questioning my analysis at many points. I benefited immensely from the interaction, but there were still points on which we agreed to disagree, based in large part on our preferred approach. I expect that the same will go for others as well. I have much less love for detail than most of my colleagues, which is a mixed blessing. Although it may allow me to see the big picture more easily at times, it can also be an excuse for leaving too many loose ends unattended. I’m glad that God has wired some to be lovers of detail so they can cheerfully and thoroughly do things that would drive me postal. Yet this thankfulness must triumph over my former prejudice against those who love detail.
I write candidly about these issues because I know that there will be zealots who read my book and take up the same banner I once carried that said “Discourse studies hold the answer to everything.” Some will probably out-Runge Runge, just as some Wallace-ites do with his work. It seems inevitable, unfortunately. There is only so much that can be conveyed in a book, and one has little control over what is done with it after publication. My hope is that the remaining axe-grinding against traditional approaches in A Discourse Grammar can be properly processed for what it is, the vestiges of a new scholar’s first book. They should not be seen as a rally cry to bash or reject traditional grammar, but as a call to meaningfully engage and learn from those on whose shoulders this work is built. Raise a toast to the dead grammarians, and to those who yet remain!
I have really enjoyed the summer break from blogging and most things academic. My present task-list at Logos has mainly involved writing, which has taken up much of my creative energies in recent months. Most of the rest of my year is now planned out and organized, so it’s time to get back into the swing of blogging and preparing for fall conferences. For the first time since 2005 I will not be presenting a paper at SBL. I had submitted two proposals; one was not accepted, the other was withdrawn when a heath issue arose in the family, which has now passed.
My proposal accepted for ETS is a critique of Porter’s theoretical model of prominence as applied to verbal aspect, and call to move in a new, more productive direction in this area of research. I am not given to critiques other than as part of the literature survey, but it seemed prudent in this case, particularly since Porter has now applied his same notion of prominence to new areas.1
My posts on this topic have been broken into two aspects of his model: markedness and grounding. I had planned on covering one at each conference, but my SBL proposal was not accepted. My ETS presentation, held in the first session on the first day, will summarize my findings regarding the methodological flaws in Porter’s approach. Understanding the flaws is key to understanding why a new direction is needed to make substantive progress. I will finish the last few posts in the coming weeks.
Most of my work days in September will be devoted to completing the High Definition Commentary volume on Philippians. The concept is to walk the reader through a synthesis of my analysis of the discourse without requiring them to learn all of the technicalities of discourse grammar. It is geared for pastors and lay leaders who lack the background to process a technical treatment of the Greek, but who want to be faithful to the flow and texture of the message. I have teamed up with Shiloh Hubbard, a very gifted graphic artist whose specialty is infographics, to create teaching slides that make complex matters more understandable. Most of these focus on illustrating the effects or task accomplished by the devices I describe in the discourse grammar. I have been surprised at how much more is demanded of my analysis to provide a simplified overview than would have been required by a more technical treatment. The nagging question that continuously haunts me is “So what?” While it may be nifty to me that some fancy rhetorical device is used, what difference does it make to Paul’s message? What effect does it bring about? Why would he want to phrase it this way, based on the other exegetical indicators from the context? Hmmm. Not a question that finds its way into scholarship as much as perhaps it should. The mandate to be practical and understandable has raised the bar on my scholarship, requiring a deeper level of insight into the passage than needed by the analysis of the Greek text.
What’s the biggest stumbling block? Synthesis, moving from discretely identifying the individual features to a holistic description of the composite message. It reminds me of Mark Twain’s quip apologizing for writing a long letter because he didn’t have the time to write a short one. Shorter and simpler is harder, at least for me. This project will serve as cliff notes for a more technical treatment somewhere down the road.
One of my big epiphanies this summer was a more practical understanding of γάρ and its function in discourse. This is particularly the case in long chains of such clauses, as in Romans 1. It was one thing to write a description in the discourse grammar, and something else to answer the “So what” question.
Ain’t grammar grand?
- See Stanley E. Porter, “Prominence: An Overview,” in The Linguist as Pedagogue, edited by Stanley E Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, 45-74. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2009. [↩]
If you have wondered what got me interested in discourse studies, there is a blog post describing the problem that started it all. It also provides some links to the projects that I have been working on this summer. I have spent the last two hours typing out a much longer narrative about how this problem turned into my doctoral program, but neglected to save it in the process and WordPress seems not to have auto-saved it. Guess I’ll try again some other time. At any rate, here is the link.
I plan on resuming blogging after Labor Day, so stay tuned.
A recent email raised a great question about a claim I make in the discourse grammar that my approach is complementary to traditional approaches to Greek. One might argue that my disuse of many traditional exegetical categories would argue instead for supplanting traditional approaches instead of complementing it. Here is a snippet from the message:
As I continue to read your work and Levinsohn’s, I get the impression that this approach to the language rarely makes use of the traditional categories. As you’ve claimed in your grammar and elsewhere, the insights that grammarians have gleaned from the text owe more to the context than they do the forms. This explains the majority of my frustration in trying to append the right label to a certain genitive, for instance. In one sense, this is freeing. My exegesis can focus more on the text as a whole rather than wasting time hunting down the right category (and God knows I have spent countless hours doing that!). But it leaves me wondering how exactly these two approaches are complementary. Second year Greek students are taught to think in categories and even if a broader approach is taken, the residual effect is largely the same: parse the word and find the right category. At the end of the day, I feel less than confident about my exegesis due to the subjective nature of the task. And brother, that won’t preach. (snip) But when it comes down to marking up my Greek text, making an observation worksheet, etc., (and this is really the big question here) what do I need to discard from the traditional approach? In what way should these syntactical categories be used, if at all? What exactly is obsolete here? How does your exegetical method employ the traditional approach and which areas are eclipsed by DA?
Ah, grasshopper, you ask good question!! Grammar and exegesis, at least in my view, are fundamentally descriptive in nature. Metaphorically, they are something like a picture, a representation of what I see in the text. Ideally this picture should be as exact a representation as possible, not impressionistic (i.e., eisegetical). Preservation of the original is of the utmost importance, contrary to what Claude Monet may have argued.
Grammatical categories, whether derived from traditional or discourse approaches, both serve the same purpose: communicating what you see. There is a statement that “Second year Greek students are taught to think in categories…parse the word and find the right category.” I think it might be more accurate to say that the categories are the terminology you use to describe what you see. The goal is not to assign a category, believe it or not, even if this is what you are graded on. The goal is to understand what is going on in the text, and then to be able to interact with others (including commentaries) about that. The labels are to facilitate communication of what you see. The categories are a descriptive tool for communication, nothing more. I think Wallace would agree with me on this point.
First and foremost, the exegete needs to personally understand the text, or metaphorically see what is going on; otherwise there is nothing to communicate, you have no idea what label to assign. I personally found that Brooks and Winberry’s categories were only of value after I knew what was going on. Otherwise their lists were little more than a multiple choice menu of exegetical options. This was my main motivation to pursue discourse studies in the first place. I felt that I had been trained to do little more than assign a category. If I did this successfully, then I must understand what is going on, right?
There is a rather stark difference in what each of the approaches uses as their basis of description. The traditional divisions of the genitive into source, means, partitive, etc., have a lot to do with the variety of options available in English to uniquely specify one relation versus another. In Greek, there are not such sub-distinctions in many cases. The semantics of the context narrow things down. In any case, note that the goal is to narrow down the semantic range of meaning from something general to something more specific. You can do this without assigning a label, but you have a pretty hard time communicating what you see or think to someone else. How about translation? The same kinds of problems arise, as there may not be an acceptable literal equivalent in English, and the dynamic translation may obscure the exegetical detail you are interested in.
Has discourse grammar eclipsed traditional approaches? I don’t think so. But there are some features that the former is better suited to describe than the latter. Discourse grammar is most helpful when the focus is on function, on what something is doing. Most of these features are operating above the clause level. This might be clause-clause relationships like connectives, interclausal relationships like forward-pointing references or information structure. These tasks are nearly impossible to nail down in terms of what they mean, even having a nice label for the function. And let’s be sure not to make discourse approaches a straw Superman that rights all wrongs and rids the world of evil. One could just as easily assign discourse labels and not understand the text as assigning traditional ones. It cuts both ways, so let’s not lose sight of that.
Each approach to grammar has its strengths and weaknesses. If you have read my work, you have not seen me try to change many of the traditional categories, like the case roles. I think there is much that can be learned from linguistics about how cases operate that would help streamline the descriptive process, but the basic traditional categories work well for communication purposes.
The main thing to remember is that exegetical categories serve primarily as metalanguage to describe what you see in the passage. Assigning them will not necessarily help you understand the passage better.
At times, atomizing into sub-categories can be more of a hindrance than a help, because it obscures a larger pattern. My biggest complaint about use of these categories is the failure to help students synthesize the specifics into a unified whole. The more specific and numerous the categories, the more difficult (or impossible) the synthesis process. I think we could get by with far fewer categories 80-90% of the time. Save the more obscure ones for reference purposes in the rare instances they are needed.
For my part, I am not as big a fan of detail as those who love the categories. Therefore, I will never be able (nor do I want) to offer them some turn-key equivalent, couched in the language of discourse. I spent two days last week crashing an SIL linguistics workshop on syntax and semantics. What did I find? Tons of little semantic categories that I found difficult to synthesize. They serve an important purpose, but are only of use after you understand what is going on in the passage. They serve only as a means of communication, nothing more. So lest you think I am anti-traditional, know that I am just as anti-linguistics when it comes to bifurcation and atomization.
Our predilection for atomization (combined with the lack of attention to synthesis) is a leading cause in the slow death of biblical languages. However, the importance of the attention to detail for doctrinal and theological reasons will always make detailed categories needed. But if they are not needed for your present purposes of writing a sermon, I do not see the value in using them just for the sake of labeling. If you understand what is going on and can communicate what you see, then move along. If you have a question about the exact sense or what to call it, commentaries or databases like the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament offer help.
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on these matters. What would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches? I stand by my claim that they are complementary in nature. The overlap is less extensive than one might think.
I have always been a pretty practical guy, with no time to invest in theoretical mumbo-jumbo. Theory always struck me as a useless waste of time, ivory tower thinking that had no connection to reality. This was the mindset I had when I first met with Christo Van der Merwe in 2001 at the SBL Annual meeting in Denver to discuss doctoral studies. He had struck me as a very practical scholar, and our meeting seemed to confirm this impression. He attended the conference wearing jeans and wind breaker; his food of choice was a good burger.
He asked me what I had been reading for the last year or so and what I thought of the works. I began rattling off the books and articles that Stephen Levinsohn had encouraged me to read, as well as other works I had found in bibliographies. He seemed pleased, said that he thought I was ready to register, but one thing was missing. I needed to develop a knowledge of cognitive linguistics and language processing in order to have a sound theoretical framework. I almost laughed. Why in the world would I want to read theoretical literature about how we think about language? What could that possibly offer? Such a waste of time, thought I. About a month later, I heard the same thing from Levinsohn, making me think that he and Christo were in cahoots. Grudgingly, I trusted my mentors and began reading some of the most esoterically-oriented literature I have ever encountered. It was model after theoretical model of how humans appear to process and store information. What could this possibly add to my research? First, a story.
Back in the day, I was big into Boy Scouts, earning my eagle award just before my 16th birthday. I was doing my best to be an avid outdoorsman, and orienteering skills played a big part of that. Orienteering is the use of map and compass for navigation. It began with learning the basic workings of a compass, then moved on to understand things like keys to map symbols, scale, topography and much more. Synthesizing this knowledge allowed me to get to know a place–what it looked like, where major landmarks were, the lay of the terrain–all without ever having been to the place.
Plotting out my first hike on a map at a troop meeting was simple, I just drew some lines and connected some dots. Easy, right? Trying to follow that course in reality was a chore. My theoretical path cut across contours, which meant going up and down hill a lot. Most trails follow the contour to avoid this as much a possible. I paid little attention to water features, like crossing streams. In practice we had to move up and down stream to find a suitable place to cross. The more trips I planned, the more I learned about “what not to do.” Each experience helped be to better understand and synthesize the information on the map. It helped me to picture what I would find, even though I had never been there.
The theoretical aspects of orienteering–representing information abstractly with symbols, lines and squiggles–were invaluable, but only as I used them. To really make it work for mr, it took applying the theoretical to real life practice. This application ended up deepening my theoretical understanding, believe it or not. All of this culminated in organizing a prospecting trip with my dad up near Mt. Baker. I was responsible for navigating us from one point to another, and for recording where each assay sample was taken. This was no easy task, fighting our way through 6′ high salal and devil’s club, across steep ravines. It was some of the roughest terrain I have ever seen. But thanks to (mostly) accurate topo maps and years of applying the theory, we successfully made it through. Why no GPS? The tree canopy was too heavy to pick up more than one satellite. We had to go old school.
So what does orienteering have to do with theoretical frameworks? A lot! Theory–for theory’s sake–can indeed be a colossal waste of time, the very ivory tower thing that comes to mind. But sound theory that works in practice is invaluable. Having an accurate map of how things work can tell me what to expect in a place that I have never been before. When navigating new territory–either geographical or linguistic–knowing what to expect and how things ought to look is invaluable. If I am looking into something new to me like word order, conjunctions, or (heaven forbid) verbal aspect, knowing how these operations tend to work in the world’s languages is something like a map. It will not tell me exactly what Greek will look like, but it should give me a good idea of significant landmarks to be on the lookout for. This theoretical background acts as a safeguard to keep me from getting lost, from claiming something that runs counter to how things are expected to work based on a broader linguistic understanding.
Recall that I described our Mt. Baker topo maps as (mostly) accurate. They appear to have been made from aerial photos without field verification. There was a huge boulder field that I was using as a reference point. Just one problem: the location of the boulders on the map varied fairly significantly from where my calculations said it was in the field. “Houston, we have a problem.” As a result of this mismatch, we ended up devoting what should have been a second day prospecting to retracing the track of Day 1 to see who was correct, me or the map. Happily, the eagle scout’s knowledge proved superior! Had we trusted the flawed map as a bearing point, all of our data would have been thrown off by several hundred yards.
I have devoted a lot of time of late to critiquing Stan Porter’s model of verbal aspect. Figuratively speaking, the claims made in his Verbal Aspect volume have functioned as a map of the Greek verb for NT studies for more than 20 years. From the very beginning scholars like Moises Silva have suggested that parts of the map appear inaccurate, based on some field-testing in exegesis.1 A rigorous application of the model to the gospel of Luke has also raised some questions, since it lead to counter-intuitive conclusions much of the time.2 Porter’s own application of his model to Mark 11 has drawn similar criticism. 3 You’d think that a hand-selected example would fare better, but the counter-intuitive conclusions the model suggests in application remain problematic.
These recurring problems in the field application are why I decided to go back and look at the theory that underlies it. How does it mesh with the maps one finds of other languages? In reading the sources that undergird Porter’s model, his diverges from their principles and claims suggest that the problem lies in the model itself. If the implementation of a model reveals flaws, one should go back to “what we know to be true” from the typological studies of these phenomena. In other words, if the boulder field and other significant landmarks continue to appear out of place in ongoing field trials, it may call for something other than blaming the guys in the field. It may be an issue with the map itself.
Theory is incredibly useful, but only if it works in the field. I still have no real love for theory, but I have an even stronger aversion for “getting lost.” There are some great linguistic maps available that can safeguard one’s description, even if breaking new ground. Developing a sound theoretical framework, one that is consistent with the broader field is an invaluable safeguard to keep you on the proper path. I no longer balk at Van der Merwe or Levinsohn for the priority they place on theory. On the contrary, I thank them in nearly every communication with them for impressing its importance on me. Bad theory will get you lost, good theory will get you home safely. Invest in good theory.
- Moises Silva, “A Response to Fanning and Porter on Verbal Aspect.” In Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research, edited by Stanley E. Porter and D. A. Carson, 74-82. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993. [↩]
- Jody Bernard, “Is Verbal Aspect a Prominence Indicator? An Evaluation of Stanley Porter’s Proposal with Special Reference to the Gospel of Luke.” Filología Neotestamentaria 19 (2006): 3-29. [↩]
- He claims that the participles δεδεμένον and ἑστηκότων in v. 4 and εὐλογημέν- in vv. 9-10 are the most salient actions on the basis of their stative aspect. “Some have found it implausible that the perfect tense-form is used to frontground the colt and the calls of those welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem, especially since these tense-forms are supposedly relatively common for these verbs in the Greek of the New Testament” (Stanley E. Porter, “Prominence: An Overview.” In The Linguist as Pedagogue, edited by Stanley E Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, 45-74 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2009), 61). [↩]
This post continues a series considering Porter’s claim that the Greek tense-forms are markers of aspectual prominence. As noted in the previous posts here and here, Porter construes markedness to be quantitative rather than qualitative, i.e. signaling that a binary quality that is either present or absent. This quantitative view allows him to talk about one form being more marked than another, as exemplified in the following statements:
There is no apparent evidence that in Greek any of the verbal aspects is semantically unmarked (contra Haberland, “Note,” 182). In fact, this work argues that even within the binary oppositions all members contribute semantic weight to the verbal component of the clause… On the basis of the concept of markedness in Greek verbal aspect (see chapts. 4 and 5 for treatment of the specific aspects involved), the binary pairs can be arranged in two oppositions. The perfect tense (stative aspect) is the most heavily marked formally, distributionally and semantically, and forms an opposition (see Ruiperez, Estructura, 45ff.). Within the Present/Aorist, the imperfective aspect on the basis of formal markedness, a slight distributional advantage, and semantic markedness is the more clearly marked member of the equipollent opposition with the perfective aspect (see e.g. McKay, 138; idem, “Syntax,” 46ff.; Lyons, Introduction, 314-15; cf. Comrie, Aspect, 127; contra e.g. Ruiperez, Estructura, 67-89; “Neutralization”).1
This claim comes one page after he introduces the concept of markedness, yet there is little discussion of exactly what he understands markedness to be. On p. 89 he states “the best exposition of markedness is Zwicky, “Markedness,” but without more discussion. He also cites Bernard Comrie and John Lyons to substantiate his quantificational conceptualization of markedness. Each of these linguists is studying the typology of language, looking for universal characteristics (qualities) that would facilitate the logical classification and description of linguistic features. They in no way attempt to create a ranked hierarchy. Markedness to them is a qualitative organizational strategy for identifying distinctive features. These features are then used to meaningfully differentiate members of a set. Markedness, as they use the term, is asymmetrical and qualitative. It is never conceived of as a quantity, though there are a few places where that might appear to be the case. I now present examples from each of the cited texts to substantiate my assertion.
I begin here with Zwicky’s introduction to “material markedness,” which refers to the morphological markers that distinguish one form in a paradigm from another. He states, “one set of forms contains a morpheme or sequence of morphemes expressing some category or combination of categories. If there is a parallel set of forms lacking this material, then it may be said to lack the mark.”2 He thus views the “morphological material” as a signal that some feature is present, whereas something lacking that mark does not signal the presence of something.
If you look at the paradigm of the third person pronoun, you’ll note that most every form has some minor difference from the other forms. The net result is to uniquely “mark” a certain set of features, e.g. case, number and gender. Everything goes swimmingly until one reaches e.g., the genitive plural forms. Note that the same form is used for all three genders. One could rightly say that this form is “unmarked” for gender, there is no signal present to specify which it is. The same kind of result is found in genitive and dative singular and plural, where there is no marker to distinguish masculine from neuter. These forms lack the distinguishing marker found on most other forms. When Zwicky talks about “material” markedness, he is referring to the phonological markers that distinguish one form from another.
He goes on to state that “forms may be materially marked to various degrees,” which sounds an awful lot like he means quantity of markers, the “semantic weight” to which Porter refers. Not so much. He uses the English word lionesses as an example, claiming that it has “two material marks, one indicating sex and one indicating number.”3 He is merely pointing out that more than one marker at a time may be present. His example has the -ess gender marker on lion as well as the plural marker -s. We could make the same kind of observations about αὐτός, where there are three markers present on some forms: one for case, one for gender and one for number. Although these marks can be counted, they cannot be weighed. Zwicky and the others want to find some means of identifying the most basic forms across languages, and counting markers seemed like a legitimate method at the time.4
Now let’s take a look at his treatment of implicational markedness, by which he refers to the forms that have the “less normal or expected state” as being marked. “Implicationally marked forms will tend to show fewer irregularities than the implicationally unmarked forms … It is important to stress that implicational markedness concerns categories in general (or categories in certain sorts of contexts), rather than particular instances of categories.”5
A paragraph later, Zwicky makes clear that he is referring to categorical distinctions that are binary in nature, i.e. qualitative markers. Here there is another statement that could appear at first to offer Porter support for his notion of “semantic weight, i.e. some quantifiable amount. A careful reading eliminates this possibility. Zwicky illustrates implicational markedness using the singular/dual/plural distinction in German. The first binary distinction he makes is between -Plural (singular) and +Plural (Dual and Plural). He considers the -Plural to be the unmarked member because it manifests few markers, whereas the +Plural is more marked. One then can divide the +Plural into +Dual (marked) versus -Dual (unmarked), with markedness again determined by the complexity of qualitative markers used to distinguish one member from another. I will come back to whether Zwicky’s approach is useful (or even valid) in a later post. My goal here is simply to outline what he means by material and implicational markedness. In both instances, he is referring to the presence or absence of qualitative markers. The apparently quantitative statements refer only to complexity of the markers, not their semantic weight.
Recall that Zwicky’s goal is typological classification. He wants to figure out whether linguistic markers can be used to identify the most simple member of a given set within a given language. The hope is that such a finding could lead to some universal means of identifying such forms that would work across a host of languages. His goal is to bootstrap the classification of language features, not to quantify their semantic value. He concludes his introduction with one final point.
An important feature of this framework is that it concerns itself almost entirely with tendencies rather than strict regularities, so that there are apparent counterexamples to the principles I discuss, these resulting from the effects of the other tendencies that conflict with the tendencies relating to markedness. In pursuing my rather modest ends I disregard such complexities for the sake of exposition, though while doing so I admit that each case calls for further analysis and that the weight of these cases taken together needs careful assessment.6
This caveat makes it sound as though even Zwicky is unsure of how sound his method is, as though it is just a trial balloon. The caveats in his conclusion confirm this notion.7
Porter apparently understands Zwicky claims about markedness to be quantitative rather than qualitative. He conflates these two divergent models as though there was no meaningful distinction between them,8 Porter considers a number of factors that he feels contribute to the “semantic weight” of a form, which lead to its quantitative ranking from least marked (perfective aspect) to most marked (stative aspect). Here is what I mean. After weighing evidence regarding tense-form stem formation, tense infixes and other factors, he concludes, “In general it can be seen that the Present is morphologically bulkier than the Aorist, often evidencing double consonants or lengthened vowels.”9 The point here is that the same kinds of qualitative markers discussed above with αὐτός are essentially being added up to establish a quantifiable semantic value. His goal is to determine which member of the set is more/most heavily weighted, based on the number/complexity of “material markers.” Zwicky never makes such a claim, nor does he hold out the possibility that it could be done.
Regarding implicational markedness, Porter again weighs the various factors as though they were quantitative. “The Present/Imperfect as the more heavily marked form evidences fewer irregularites as a verbal category: e.g. ω forms overwhelmingly predominate over μι forms, unlike the diversity of weak and strong Aorists; the Aorist, regardless of its formation of the Active and Middle Voice, has an irregular formation of the Passive with (θ)ην … and the Aorist of course does not have the augment outside of the Indicative.”10
So what do these factors lead Porter to conclude? Is he looking for the simplest form for typological purposes like Zwicky? No, he is postulating a “semantic weight” based on the amount of markedness a given tense-form manifests: “The Aorist and Present/Imperfect instead comprise a bipolar opposition, with the Aorist as the less heavily marked and the Present as the more heavily marked on the basis of material, implicational, distributive and semantic criteria.”11 Twenty years later in an article on prominence, Porter affirms these earlier conclusions, relying upon the same sources used in his dissertation.12
As was the case with grounding, Porter’s misunderstanding of the literature regarding material and implicational markedness undermines two of the four pillars supporting his claims about the prominence values of the tense-forms. I will take up the other two kinds of markedness in future posts.
Return to On Porter, Prominence and Aspect
- Stanley E. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament: With Reference to Tense and Mood (Studies in Biblical Greek 1; New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 90. Italics mine. [↩]
- Arnold M. Zwicky, “On Markedness in Morphology,” Die Sprache: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft Wien 24, no. 2 (1978): 130. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Zwicky, Lyons and Comrie attempted to count markers as a metric for judging complexity, but do not translate this to a claim about semantic weighting. They simply focus on complexity. Several recent papers by Martin Haspelmath shatter any notion that such counting is a credible approach. Edna Andrews does the same with frequency/statistics in her chapter “Myths about Markedness.” See Martin Haspelmath, “Against Markedness (and What to Replace It With),” Journal of Linguistics 42, no. 01 (2006): 25–70; Haspelmath, “Frequency Vs. Iconicity in Explaining Grammatical Asymmetries,” Cognitive Linguistics 19, no. 1 (February 2008): 1-33; Edna Andrews, Markedness Theory: the Union of Asymmetry and Semiosis in Language (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990). Porter curiously cites two of these works in his most recent paper on prominence, neither acknowledging nor engaging their arguments against his claims. His citation of Andrews in note 37 makes it seem as though it lent favorable support toward his methodology. (Porter, “Prominence: An Overview,” pp. 45-74 in The Linguist as Pedagogue (ed. S E Porter and M B O’Donnell, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2009), 55 n. 36, 56 n. 37. ) [↩]
- Ibid., 131-32. [↩]
- Ibid., italics mine. [↩]
- In his conclusion Zwicky observes that “I have chosen to treat as different senses of markedness what many have seen from the outset as manifestations of a single phenomenon. Indeed this is the spirit in which Greenberg, Sehane, and Comrie approach the subject, as do the writers they build their discussions on.” (“On Markedness, 142.) Zwicky’s different senses of markedness were thus not independent means of corroborating a claim, but were simply different factors by which the most basic and simple form—an asymmetrical, qualitative default—could be identified for typological purposes. See Haspelmath, “Against Markedness,” for arguments against viewing such subdivisions of markedness as legitimate. He argues that they are all derivatives of frequency or other contextual factors. Hence, they do not provide the four independently corroborating factors that Porter claims. [↩]
- I spoke with Porter in person about this issue of conflation on the last day of 2009 SBL Annual Meeting in New Orleans. I wanted to make sure I was not misunderstanding his view. He stated that he did not see a meaningful distinction between these two approaches of markedness. His recent article on prominence does much to confirm this view. He appears to have read the qualitative claims from the linguistic literature as quantitative. This means that some of the most crucial claims of his thesis are based upon a flawed understanding markedness. [↩]
- Stanley E. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament: With Reference to Tense and Mood (Studies in Biblical Greek 1; New York: Peter Lang, 1989) 180. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Ibid., 181. [↩]
- Stanley E. Porter, “Prominence: An Overview,” in The Linguist as Pedagogue (ed. Stanley E Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2009), 56. [↩]
