Have any of you read Scott Grimm’s 2007 article, “Case Attraction in Ancient Greek”? (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007, Volume 4363/2007, 139-153.)
The abstract looks very interesting. You can purchase online access for $25, but I’m not sure what a hard copy costs.
This article appears to be an extract from his master thesis, which is freely available.
Thank you! I was not aware that his thesis was out there for free download.
By the way… it’s great to hear from you.
I found what appears to be the full text version here, perhaps a draft: http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/tafseer/grimm_case_attraction.pdf
It looks like the outgrowth of an MSC thesis from Univ of Amsterdam. Thanks for the heads up.
That’s wonderful, Steve. I just compared the first page of the pdf to the first page of the preview on the abstract page linked in the original post above, and they look the same. I will enjoy reading it!
Do any of you know where Scott is these days or how to get in touch with him? It would be nice to be able to converse with him about his view of case attraction or invite him to join the discussion online.
Considering the date of the article and the information provided by Steve’s link, I’d bet that he’s still at Stanford…
And it looks like he still is:
http://linguistics.stanford.edu/people/students/
I’ve had a read of this article this afternoon. (It is a nice coincidence that I’m teaching the relative pronoun in my Greek class tomorrow.)
The article is a bit hard to follow, especially at the end, without understanding optimality theory (OT). Fortunately, the article on OT on Wikipedia is good enough to make sense of what Grimm is doing with those attraction tableaux at the end in TABLES 2 and 3.
What I think the article contributes is some further specifying of the conditions under which attraction takes place (non-agentivity), an independent justification of the already observed case hierarchy in attraction, and an integration of the related phenomenon of “inverse attraction.” How to teach this, on the other hand, is going to be challenging.
I look forward to reading it myself, perhaps tomorrow. I’ve got a number of things to complete before I can get to it, but it sounds really interesting. I’ll read up on Optimality Theory too.
Here’s a handy explanation of OT conveniently geared toward biblical and ANE scholars: “The Rise of Optimality Theory in First Century Palestine”.
That’s a very funny story. While the article does provide a basic perspective on Optimality Theory, I get the sense that the purpose of the article was comedic—a chance to tell a great story from the Talmud.
I just sent Scott Grimm an email and invited him to join the discussion. I don’t know if he will want to do so or have the time, but I made the plea. Personally, I’d love to hear him comment on his work.
I received a very gracious email from Scott Grimm who said he would be willing to engage in dialogue with us if we have questions about his thesis. If you are reading it and would like to ask anything, post it here, and I’ll pass it along to him. I think he will be willing to write a response.