Mike Aubrey January 17, 2017 Cognitive Linguistics, Grammar, Greek, Historical Linguistics, Language, Linguistics

A comprehensive grammar of Koine Greek

I posted a new set of pages here on the website, providing the current table of contents of my wife and I’s in-progress reference grammar.

It’s time we stop pretending that it’s anything more than a pipe dream and start showing the evidence that this project is real, albeit slow in is progress.

We could use help, but we are still examining what that would/could look like and what our needs are.

Take a look, if you’d like: The Grammar.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

8Comments

Add yours

1

Eeli Kaikkonen on January 18, 2017 at 2:00 am
Reply

Do you have any idea of the size, how many pages? 500, 1000, 2000? Will you publish the text in e-form while you write, or will you save it for more traditional publishing, or both?

LikeLike
- 2
  
  Mike Aubrey on January 18, 2017 at 12:29 pm
  Reply
  
  These are all questions that still don’t have complete answers.
  
  We’ve written probably 40,000 words so far?
  
  Ideally a hybrid digital-traditional approach is what we’d want. There’s so much more potential for meaningfully providing comprehensive data/analysis in digital in a way that would be impossible in print. But we’d definitely prefer to have some form of print edition as well. 800 to 1000 pages seems not unreasonable–Muraoka’s LXX Syntax hits 900, for example.
  
  LikeLike
3

Kevin Woodruff on January 18, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Reply

Interjections seem to be missing

LikeLike
- 4
  
  Mike Aubrey on January 18, 2017 at 6:03 pm
  Reply
  
  Thank you! I’ve added it to chapter 12 in part I (Other lexical classes) and to chapter 9 in part II (Discourse structure)
  
  LikeLike
5

David Rogers on January 18, 2017 at 6:59 pm
Reply

Looks exciting. I do hope that you will clearly define those terms that rarely occur in most people’s discourse. I’m totally unfamiliar with “semelfactives” and it would prove frustrating to have to keep a dictionary open just to read the text. I’m not saying don’t use them, just define them. Also, if you are introducing new terminology equivalent to terms others use, it would be helpful to have a comprehensive comparative means of some kind.

LikeLike
- 6
  
  Mike Aubrey on January 18, 2017 at 8:34 pm
  Reply
  
  There will certainly be a glossary.
  
  A semelfactive is a kind of predicate that conveys an instantaneous event where there is no change of state.
  
  So a sentence like The balloon popped is instantaneous and there’s also a change that the balloon undergoes, but a semelfactive is different in that the there’s an instantaneous event that doesn’t have a change:
  
  The headlights flashed.
  The candle flickered.
  
  In both cases, the main participant of the event (headlights & candle, respectively) are the same afterward the event is over as they were before it began.
  
  Also, at the end of part II, you can see that we have plans for an index that helps navigate between traditional Greek grammar and our own work.
  
  LikeLike
7

Kevin W. Woodruff on January 19, 2017 at 5:48 am
Reply

I don’t know if you plan on doing much with what is normally termed “particles,” but they are often neglected. In fact Wallace’s grammar does not mention them at all. Words like αν, αμην. γε, μεν, δη. Whole books (e.g. Dennison, Thrall) have been done on them, but they often neglected or given short shrift in most grammars.

LikeLike
- 8
  
  Mike Aubrey on January 19, 2017 at 7:16 am
  Reply
  
  There are no plans for a dedicated chapter dedicated solely to them, but they will all be discussed in their respective semantic location (e.g. αν will certainly (ἀμήν) get attention in modality and ἀμήν will possibly (αν) be dealt within the same place, as well, as in yes/no questions as a means of answering them).
  
  The idea is to keep particles organized by their meaning, instead of just particles, we want to have a subsection on modal participle in the chapter on modality, a section on focus-marking particles in the chapter on information structure, and so forth.
  
  LikeLike