linguistics

David A. Black, in his Sunday morning blog post (you’ll need to scroll for it–April 23, 8:30AM) mused about the possibility of hosting a Greek linguistics conference at Southern Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He asked for feedback on the idea and since I was mentioned in the post directly, I thought I should take a moment and provide some. He brought up several issues and I have given them headings below:

Topics to Cover?

Dr. Black mentioned a number of possible topics that such an event could cover:

  • Lexical semantics
  • The usefulness of “semantic domains”
  • Verbal aspect theory
  • Developing oral competency in Greek
  • The place of electronic tools in Greek pedagogy
  • Replacing the Erasmian pronunciation
  • Deponency
  • Discourse analysis
  • Linguistic “schools”

Some of these topics are very large and general (lexical semantics), while others are very specific (replacing the Erasmian pronunciation). If the goal is deal examine multiple topics, then it would probably be useful to create a sense of equal footing in terms of how they related to linguistics hierarchically. Something like this might work:

  • Lexical semantics
    • Semantic domains
  • Morphosyntax/semantics
    • Tense & Aspect
    • Voice
    • Predicate types
  • Pedagogy
    • Oral competency
    • Electronic tools
    • Pronunciation
  • Linguistic Theory
    • Discourse analysis
    • Linguistic schools/frameworks

Things worth adding?

Probably syntax, at the very least.

  • Syntax
    • Valance/Argument structure
    • Syntactic treebanks & their frameworks
    • Problems with discontinuous structures

I would also probably want to add to the Lexical Semantics section:

  • Polysemy-monosemy
  • Metaphor theory

And to the Linguistic theory section:

  • perspectives on diachronic and synchronic analysis
  • The relevance of language typology to grammatical analysis
  • Perspectives on method in grammatical analysis

Another issue that come to mind that wouldn’t necessarily neatly fit elsewhere would be: the importance of using a corpus larger than the New Testament and then also the need for open research data beyond merely published prose.

Those ideas are just off the top of my head. I’m sure I could come up with more if I sat down and really thought about it. That is part of the problem. There is so much to do. Most of the time, my concern is that NT scholars are so incredible caught up in the debates and the controversies that we lose sight of everything else that needs to be done.

The other difficulty is this: It would be possible to have a conference on any individual one of these topics listed above and still never do much more than scratch the surface.

Who should participate?

For my own part, I would be quite interested, though I am also aware that I continue to lack the traditional qualifications. Still, I have dedicated the past ten years to participating in many of these discussions online and I certainly have a vested interest. I think it would be wise to also include the people in the Biblical Humanities community. Beyond that, I’m not sure that I’m in a position to suggest participants.

Papers or Discussion Groups?

When I attended the Biblical languages and Technology workshop at the Lorentz Centre in 2012, we had a mix of both. Invited papers, followed by discussion groups. The downside to that approach was that you had to choose a topic from amongst the papers. That was not always easy. Then after the discussion groups, we came back together and effectively shared our findings. The structure of the event might be something you would want to hold off on decided on until after the topic or topics were established.

 

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Martin Haspelmath has an interesting piece about the intersection between grammar writing and typology on his website, responding to a recent article in the journal Linguistic Typology:

Should descriptive grammars be “typologically informed”, and what does this mean?

The thrust of the post is probably this quote here:

“While the language documenter’s and describer’s work is no doubt “greatly enhanced” by knowing about typology, are description and comparison also part of the same enterprise? I have argued that they are not, even though they are of course mutually beneficial (Haspelmath 2016). The difference is that description relies exclusively on language-internal distribution (Croft 2001), while comparison relies on substantively defined semantic and/or formal concepts.”

As someone currently working on a grammar project, this is food for thought. It seems to me that there’s a case to be made for a greater inclusion of typological information in a grammar depending on the intended audience. The intended audiences of writing a grammar of a well-known language vs. the writing of a grammar of a heretofore undocumented language are going to be different.

(also: Happy Easter!)

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.

 

 

I could have sworn that I had mentioned Lars Nordgren’s book, Greek Interjections Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics at some point before, but apparently not. I can’t find the post. In any case, his book received a detailed review in the latest issue of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review by Coulter George:

Lars Nordgren, Greek Interjections: Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics. Trends in linguistics, 273.   Berlin; Boston:  De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. Reviewed by Coulter H. George, University of Virginia

Nordgren’s book is, of course, expensive on Amazon (here), though with all such monographs, patient waiting can often land you a reasonably priced copy–I picked one up about a year ago.

The author has a academia.edu page, as well, but he has not uploaded any papers.