Category: Bibliography

Updates to “A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics”

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Additions to A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics

I have added the following items to the Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics:

Of course, this bibliography can never be truly comprehensive, contrary to what the title may imply, because the field is not static. As new works appear that fulfill the narrow criteria for inclusion, I add them to make the bibliography as comprehensive as possible.

If you know of works that you think should be included, please recommend them. You can use the “Bibliography” link in the main menu to do that. That link will take you to a page that explains what kinds of works are accepted, and gives you a form to make your recommendation easily.

I hope you enjoy the new additions.

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The Change from SOV to SVO in Ancient Greek

I have added the following article by Ann Taylor to the bibliography at Greek-Language.com:

“The change from SOV to SVO in Ancient Greek.” Language Variation and Change. 6.1 (1994) 1-37.

While the order of major sentence constituents is quite free at every stage in the development of Ancient Greek, the distribution of those constituents is not random at any stage, and one particular constituent order can be shown to be dominant at each stage. Taylor argues that the dominant constituent order was verb-final (SOV) in Homer, but changed to verb-medial (SVO) by the Hellenistic period.

Using the paradigm of Kroch (1989), Taylor constructs two models—one for the verb-final grammar of the Homeric period (before 800 B.C.) and one for the verb-medial grammar of the Hellenistic Koiné (c. 100 A.D.). She describes the intervening period (Herodotus, c. 450 B.C.) as in part like Homer and in part like the Koiné. She shows further that the ratio of these two constituent orders in Herodotus is also supported by an independent measure of the distribution of weak pronouns and clitics.

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Language Choice in Ancient Palestine

I have added Hughson Ong’s article, “Language Choice in Ancient Palestine: A Sociolinguistic Study of Jesus’ Language Use Based on Four ‘I Have Com'” Sayings” (Biblical and Ancient Greek Linguistics. 1.3 [2012]) to the bibliography at Greek-Language.com.

Here’s the abstract I included:

Ong discusses language authenticity to address a problem in historical Jesus research—the lingua franca of Jesus’ social environment. Using sociolinguistic principles he argues that Palestine was a multilingual society and that various social groups necessitate the use of language varieties, raising the issue of language choice (the occasions and reasons multilingual people use their native tongue over and against their second language). Ong’s objective is to show in four “I have come” sayings in the Synoptic Gospels that, with high probability, Jesus’ internal language was Aramaic, and his public language was Greek.

Those of you interested in sociolinguistics may find Ong’s argument particularly stimulating.

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New Dissertation on Koine Word Order

In November Allison Kirk (Leiden University) completed a doctoral thesis with the title, Word order and information structure in New Testament Greek.

I have added her dissertation to the bibliography here at Greek-Language.com. With the entry I included a slightly shortened version of the abstract that appears in the entry for the dissertation at the Leiden Repository. Here’s the shortened abstract:

The dissertation examines word order variation in the Koine Greek of the New Testament in declarative clauses, questions and relative clauses. Kirk examines the way word order corresponds to information structure. She argues that although New Testament Greek shows a variety of possible permutations of the sentence elements subject (S), verb (V) and object (O), in declarative clauses, questions and relative clauses; the word order is not free. Rather, it is partly governed by phrase structure and partly by information structural considerations such as Topic and Focus. The basic word order is described as VSO with an SVO alternative. Marked clauses, such as SOV, OVS, OSV, and some SVO clauses, involve topicalization or focus movement of the arguments.

You can download the entire text from the Leiden Repository.

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Thomas Hudgins' Discourse Analysis of John 17

I have added the following article by Thomas Hudgins to A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics.

Hudgins, Thomas W. “An Application of Discourse Analysis Methodology in the Exegesis of John 17.” Eleutheria: Vol. 2: Iss. 1 (2012), Article 4.

Here’s the comment I made on it there:

Hudgins applies discourse analysis methodology to the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel. The familiar prayer of Jesus in that chapter has traditionally been analyzed in terms of the three referents (Jesus, his contemporary disciples, and future disciples). Hudgins, however, gives greater attention to the “mainline verbs,” shifting the focus to Jesus’ requests and final commitment. By giving greater structural significance to these verbs, he is able to present a fresh understanding of the structural division and natural outline of Jesus’ prayer.

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Updates to bibliographic entries for Bortone and Luraghi

I have updated the entries for the following two books

  • Luraghi, Silvia. On the meaning of prepositions and cases: Semantic roles in Ancient Greek. Studies in language companion series 67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003.
  • Bortone, Pietro. Greek prepositions from antiquity to the present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

in A Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics. The updates include a brief description of each book and a link to Mike Aubrey’s reviews.

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Two new items for the bibliography

I’ve added the following two works by Christina Sevdali to my Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics. Both address Classical Greek, but I have been unable to find similar works addressing the Hellenistic period. If you know of works that use a similar method to address control and infinitival constructions in the Hellenistic period, I would love to hear about them.

Sevdali, Christina. ‘Control into CPs: when finiteness does not matter’. In C. Halpert, J. Hartman and D. Hill (eds.) Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop in Greek syntax and semantics at MIT. MIT Working Papers in linguistics 57 (2009), 251 – 266.

Sevdali, Christina. ‘‘Infinitival clauses in Ancient Greek: overt and null subjects, the role of Case and Focus’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, supervised by Professor Ian Roberts, 2007.

If you are interested in following Dr. Sevdali’s work, you can find more information here: University of Ulster – Linguistics Research.

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Rutger Allan: The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek: A Study of Polysemy

Thanks to Mike Aubrey for making me aware of the free download of Rutger J. Allan’s dissertation on the Middle Voice in Ancient Greek. You can download the whole dissertation or individual chapters here.

While Dr. Allan was dealing with Homeric and Classical Greek, many of his observations and conclusions appear to be very applicable to the hellenistic period as well.

I have added the published version as well as the dissertation to my online bibliography.

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Mark Janse on Hellenistic Greek

I have added eight works by Mark Janse to my Comprehensive Bibliography of Hellenistic Greek Linguistics. (Thanks to Mike Aubrey for providing the bibliographic information on six of them and a lead to the seventh.)

Dr. Janse is Research Professor in Asia Minor and Ancient Greek at Ghent University. He has written extensively about the history of Greek and related issues in Linguistics. The publications that I have added to the bibliography are ones that consciously apply a specific insight from Linguistics to the study of Greek from the Hellenistic period, or in one case from the Classical period where no similar work has yet been published for Hellinistic Greek.

Here are the items I added:

Janse, Mark. “Aspects of Bilingualism in the History of the Greek Language.” In: J.N. Adams, Mark Janse & Simon Swain (eds.), Bilingualism in Ancient Society. Language Contact and the Written Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 332-390.

________. “The Distribution of the Enclitic Personal Pronouns in New Tetament Greek in the Light of the Septuagint and the Modern Greek Dialects of Asia Minor: A Structural-Functional Analysis.” PhD. dissertation: Ghent University, Department of Latin and Greek.

This dissertation is available from Dissertations Abstracts International 58 (1997) 776-C. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.

________. “La phrase segmentée en grec ancien. Le témoignage des enclitiques.” Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 86.1 (1991) XIV-XVI. Paris: Klinck sieck.

________. “La position des pronoms presonnels enclitiques en grec neo-testamentaire a la lumiere des dialectes neo-helleniques. In C. Brixhe ed. La koine grecque antique I (1993), 83-121. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy.

________. “Phonological Aspects of Clisis in Ancient and Modern Greek.” Glotta 73 (1995-1996) 155-167. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

________. “The Prosodic Basis of Wackernagel’s Law.” In André Crochetière, Jean-Claude Boulanger & Conrad Ouellon (eds.), Les langues menacées. Actes du XVe Congrès international des linguistes, Québec, Université Laval, 9-14 août 1992. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1993, Vol. 4, 19-22.

Originally presented as a paper at the 15th International Congress of Linguists, Quebec, August 9 to 14, 1992.

Creve, Sam, Mark Janse, and Kristoffel Demoen, “The Pauline Key Words πνεῦμα and σάρξ and their Translation.” Filología Neotestamentaria. Vol. 20 (2007), 15-31.

Mike Aubrey has himself done a good amount of work on Hellenistic Greek Clitics and reached similar conclusions. He has posted several discussions at ΕΝ ΕΦΕΣΩ.

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Randall Buth on Greek Lexicography

Today I had the pleasure of reading Randall Buth’s article, “Verbs Perception and Aspect: Greek Lexicography and Grammar.” It’s refreshing to read a Biblical Scholar talking about the work of Stephen Krashen on language acquisition.

While I did not find Buth’s argument about the aspect of Greek perfects convincing, his arguments for using the infinitival forms as the lemma in a lexicon is well informed and well presented. He argues for listing both the aorist and present infinitives, giving the aorist first place.

In the early part of the article he gives an insightful and challenging account of what happens in Biblical Greek classrooms and an honest acknowledgment of the results. This account forms the background for his proposal of a different type of lexicon. I would like to propose, though, that his critique has more far reaching implications. For the good of the field, we need major changes in the way Hellenistic Greek is taught. The methods currently employed do not produce fluent readers who can “think in Greek.”

I’ll try to find time later to write a post on the implications of Krashen’s work for the way we teach Greek. I have struggled with this issue for many years.