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Word Order, Focus, and Clause Linking in Greek Tragic Poetry

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Word Order, Focus, and Clause Linking in Greek Tragic Poetry View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Apollo Word Order, Focus, and Clause Linking in Greek Tragic Poetry Bruce Lovat Fraser Darwin College A dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Cambridge University January 1999 ii Monsieur Jourdain: Il n'y a que la prose ou les vers? Maître de philosophie: Non, monsieur: tout ce qui n'est point prose est vers, et tout ce qui n'est point vers est prose. Monsieur Jourdain: Et comme l'on parle, qu'est-ce que c'est donc que cela? Molière, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme , Act 2 Scene 4 iii For Katherine and Cassie, with all love iv Declaration No part of this dissertation is being or has been submitted for any other degree or qualification at any university, and it is the author's sole work, including nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration. The word total is under 79,900, exclusive of the bibliography, and of the three appendices, of approximately 18,000 words in total, for which an extension was granted by the Degree Committee of the Faculty of Classics. The appendices contain formatted textual passages and some statistical tabulation of data. All results and summaries appear in the body of the thesis. Texts Oxford Classical Text editions are used for Greek citations, and Loeb Classical Library editions for Latin. English translations are the author's own, and are phrased to reflect the Greek syntax as closely as possible. Homeric translations are based on those of Lattimore (1951, 1965). All statistical collation of textual material is original, unless otherwise stated. Word searches were carried out with the help of Thesaurus Linguae Graecae , CD-Rom (D) edition (1992), published by the University of California at Irvine. Acknowledgments A great debt is owed to the superlative resources of the Cambridge University Library, and to the British Academy and the Cambridge Faculty of Classics, both of whom gave financial support. I was fortunate to be supervised by specialists in two fields: Geoffrey Horrocks, who devoted an enormous amount of time to reading the drafts and provided detailed linguistic criticism, and Richard Hunter, who gave invaluable stylistic and literary advice. Pat Easterling and Peter Matthews kindly read parts of the work in progress. Anthony Bowen, James Diggle, and Ian McAuslan have my gratitude for helping me understand something of the beauty and form of the Greek language. Sincere thanks are offered to Joseph Butler, Mark Hogarth, Joyce Reynolds, and Christine Salazar for their friendship and practical help. v Sigla Abbreviations and symbols are defined at first use, and are also noted here: AI Accusative and infinitive (in a non-finite dependent clause) CG Classical Greek Comp Head position in a CP CP Complementizer phrase (the extended clause structure) FP Focus Phrase (an alternative visualisation of the CP, for languages without complementation) IE Indo-European IP Inflection phrase (the main-clause structure) OV Object>verb ordering OVO Object>verb>object hyperbaton PIE Proto-Indo-European NP Noun phrase SOV Subject>object>verb ordering SV Subject>verb ordering SVO Subject>verb>object ordering SVS Subject>verb>subject hyperbaton TP Topic phrase (in some models, distinguished from the FP above) VO Verb>object ordering VP Verb phrase VS Verb>subject ordering X' [X-bar] Intermediate phrasal structure (and also the description of the linguistic framework which uses the category) * (with italic letters) marks reconstructed PIE stems * (with roman letters) marks a hypothetical sentence which is not grammatically well-formed [ ] enclosing a phrase mark constituent boundaries in citations > marks a regular sequence of words or phrases subscript i .... i mark co-referent elements in citations Standard abbreviations of titles are used when citing ancient texts. vi Contents Introduction Page 1 Part I: Word order 26 1 The order of subject, verb, and object 27 2 The presentational cadence: word order and phonological weight 60 3 Intra-clausal poetic syntax: phrasal tmesis in the Oresteia and other texts 88 Part II: Focus 125 4 Focus, particles, and the clause start 126 Part III: Clause linking 168 5 Subordination: clause order and focalization 169 6 Complementation: verb transitivity and focalization 201 7 Inter-clausal poetic syntax: focus and the discourse functions of complementation 230 Conclusion 258 Appendices 1: Subject and verb order 261 2: Hyperbaton 287 3: Complementation 305 Bibliography 336 1 Introduction Scope The dissertation comprises an investigation of three aspects of sentence structure in Classical Greek (henceforth CG) dramatic poetry: order of the main sentence elements (subject, verb, and object) within the clause, the emphatic position at the start of the clause, and the structure of inter-clausal linking. It is argued that these three features, usually considered separately, are interdependent, and that intra-clausal word order is directly related to the structure of compound and complex sentences. 1 The discussion undertakes a systematic survey of subject, verb, and object order in a corpus of texts, 2 proposes an explanation for the observed order, and develops a model which explains how prominence within the clause is exploited in clause linking to produce the complement structures observed in Homeric and tragic complementation. The problems 1) The primary problem is to explain the high degree of consistency in the order of the main sentence elements in what is traditionally considered a ‘free word order’ language. 3 Ancient discussions usually described word order as 4 an aspect of suvnqesi" (‘composition’); and concentrated on unusual orders rather than the norm. Modern studies, though paying more attention to ‘basic word order’,5 have not identified structural motivation for the regularities, and generally attribute variations to pragmatic determinants. 6 1These terms refer to sentences of more than one clause, in a relation of conjunction or embedding respectively. See Lyons (1968: 266). 2In Chapters 1 and 2. Homeric order was discussed by Ammann (1922: 1924), Friedrich (1975), and Conrad (1990), and observations on tragic word order were made by Thomson (1938, 1939b). However, no systematic survey of tragic word order has previously been made. 3As by Kühner (1904: 595) and Dover (1960: 31). 4As Aristotle ( Rhetoric ), Cicero ( Orator ), Dionysius of Halicarnassus ( De Comp.), and Quintilian ( Institutio ). See also Denniston (1952), Scaglione (1972) and Dover (1997). 5As Kieckers (1911), Fischer (1924), Frisk (1932), Thomson (1939a), and Chantraine (1952). 6As Goodell (1890), Loepfe (1940), Dover (1960), Dunn (1988), and Dik (1995, 2007). 2 2) The prosody of the clause start is standardly considered separately from its structure: either as an emphatic first position, or in terms of enclitic elements in second position. 7 However, the structural relation between these two features has not been investigated. 3) Complementation has been extensively analysed in terms of its formal structure, 8 and its historical development has been surveyed in terms of the introductory conjunctions, 9 but not in terms of the relationships between these conjunctions (henceforth complementizers) 10 and the semantic categories of main verb types. The process by which a whole clause, rather than a referring expression within it, came to function as an argument of the main verb, 11 remains unexplained. The proposal The three problems have a unified explanation, because word order, emphasis, and clause-linking are inter-dependent. Intra-clausal word order has a morphological and a prosodic trajectory, with larger words tending to be placed later. However, there is also a position for prominent elements at the clause start (henceforth P1), which are emphatic, not only as a consequence of their initial placing, but also because they reinforced by light words in second position (henceforth P2), which mark emphasis in one of two ways. Enclitic particles are cohesive focalizers , combining phonologically with the initial constituent, so creating a larger unit. Interrogative and relative pronouns are separated from the P1 unit by an intonation break, and also create a contrast with it, by reason of their small size. In both cases the whole focal unit is separated from the basic clause by an intonation break. 7An initial emphatic position was noted by Thomson (1938: 367) and Denniston (1952: 44). Particles are analysed functionally by Denniston (1954), Ruijgh (1971, 1990), and Rijksbaron (1997a); structurally by Hale (1987, 1996), Schäufele (1991), and Wills (1993); and prosodically by Halpern (1992), Hock (1982, 1996) and Taylor (1996). Hale, Schäufele, Halpern, and Hock concentrate on Vedic Sanskrit. Other references are given in Chapter 4. 8Notably in the X-bar approach described below in Section 1. 9Most thoroughly by Monteil (1963). Other studies are cited in the main text. 10 The term ‘complementizer’ to denote a complement-introducing conjunction derives from Rosenbaum (1967). 11 The term ‘argument’ is used to identify the subject or object of a verb. For its sense in predicate calculus to denote the function of names in propositions, see Lyons (1977: 148–9). 3 In complex sentences, the trajectory of ‘weight to the right’ within the main clause combines with ‘prominence to the left’ in the following subordinate, so the focal element has a functions in two clauses simultaneously. Its prominence is linked with its exophoric (non-linguistic) reference: the grammaticalization of o{ti from a referring expression to a textually-deictic object involves a loss of specific reference, marked by an indefinite affix which is also a cohesive focalizer ( ‘say whatever you like’); while the change of function of wJ" from an adverbial to a complementizer is accompanied by the change of the preceding main verb object from a referring expression ( ‘I know you how you are’) to a textually-deictic pronoun ( ‘say this , how...’). In both constructions, the transition to complementation involves a circumstantial construction, where a verbal object is combined with a 12 modifying clause.
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