Figurative Language

April 6, 2015 By thepatrologist in Language Tags: figurative, Hermeneutics, metaphor 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this for a while, and I don’t think I’ve got it worked out yet.

Firstly, what’s the gap between literal and figurative language? Literal language is generally thought of as ‘according to the proper meaning of a word’. Figurative language, then, is when words are applied not according to their ‘proper’ meaning.

Unfortunately words cross their ‘proper bounds’ all the time, and the figurative can become literal. Is referring to the ‘leg’ of a table a proper or a figurative usage? Was it perhaps once figurative but its usage has now become literal, so that within the bounds of this lexeme’s semantic domain one must include ‘one of several generally-vertical portions of a table used to elevate the horizontal portion off the ground’?

When it comes to the Bible, nobody reads literally. And calling oneself a ‘literalist’ is itself a figurative use of the word, because it usually means ‘someone who holds to a higher concept of inspiration/authority/etc. than that group of Others’. The attempt to distinguish between ‘literal’ and ‘literalistic’, while sometimes helpful, it itself this kind of exercise in Othering. Those who want to frame themselves as ‘literal’ refer to the genre of a text, the intention of an author, the ‘normal’ ways of meaning applied in language; i.e., the recognise that the Scriptures contain figurative usages.

Our real points of contention come when we try and work out where does Figurative language ‘start’, where does it ‘end’, and where is ‘too far’? Does Figurative interpretation have ‘proper limits’? This is the concern with ‘allegory’.

What is allegory? Typically, allegory is understood to be a figure of speech involving a sustained or extended metaphor (itself not a very helpful word, “a word or phrase applied to an object or action to which it does not normally refer, to create an implied likeness or comparison”) in which multiple points of comparison are made, transforming the original text into a highly symbolic or coded text.

Rather than giving you an example of allegorical interpretation of Scripture, I want to illustrate with an allegory used within Scripture:

Judges 9:8-15

“The trees were determined to go out and choose a king for themselves. They said to the olive tree, ‘Be our king!’ But the olive tree said to them, ‘I am not going to stop producing my oil, which is used to honor gods and men, just to sway above the other trees!’ “So the trees said to the fig tree, ‘You come and be our king!’ But the fig tree said to them, ‘I am not going to stop producing my sweet figs, my excellent fruit, just to sway above the other trees!’ “So the trees said to the grapevine, ‘You come and be our king!’ But the grapevine said to them, ‘I am not going to stop producing my wine, which makes gods and men so happy, just to sway above the other trees!’ “So all the trees said to the thornbush, ‘You come and be our king!’ The thornbush said to the trees, ‘If you really want to choose me as your king, then come along, find safety under my branches! Otherwise may fire blaze from the thornbush and consume the cedars of Lebanon!’ (NET Bible)

Actually, you probably need to read all of 1-20 to get the proper context, but this is an allegory that is easily understood. It’s an extended metaphor with multiple points of comparison, giving a vivid symbolic narrative. The allegory is controlled by the author – he gives us the points of comparison and the limits of the allegory itself, in vv16-20.

The problem, generally, with allegorical interpretation of Scripture is that it is uncontrolled because the text and its author have no scope for limiting the points of comparison or analogy.

Those who rail in favour of ‘literalism’ often do so against allegorical interpretation and especially its excesses and caricatures. But attacking the extremes of figural language is no more convincing than attacking literalism by constructing a straw man of ‘literalists’ who refuse to accept even the most common figures of speech.

I think we need to do ‘better’ in this area. We need a more thorough-going thoughtfulness about how figurative language works, and how it is bounded. I hope to keep exploring this in some future posts, which I will get to whenever I get to them. But feel free to add some thoughts and questions in the comments.

State of the Projects, April 2015

April 1, 2015 By thepatrologist in Updates

Apparently I didn’t write a March edition? Probably because I spent the end of February madly trying to complete a paper and several grant applications.

It’s really a daunting discipline to write monthly updates like this. it makes me aware of how painfully slow progress can be!

Patristic Readers

I finally released some revisions to Perpetua. I should have tackled that immediately while teaching through the text. Lesson learn.

The next volume is actually not that far off completion, but I have not been able to carve out enough time to finish it off. I have less than ten pages worth of text to go, and then just checking some frequency numbers, writing some introductory material, and compiling the pdf version. If I can find the time, it could be done by the end of April.

Getting these to print is proving slower than anticipated. I guess this is the downside of working with a designer who is doing it as a side-project. I will try and get it moved along.

Papers and PhD

I worked quite hard towards the end of Feb to finish off a paper that was accepted for SBL Annual in November, so that was quite pleasing. I’ve been making slow but steady progress this month on the PhD, with some interesting reading on Basil and on Origen.

Upcoming trip

This month I’m travelling back to Mongolia for a 2 week intensive teaching block on Ephesians. So I have spent a quite considerable time writing materials on the book. Actually, I write a kind of ‘working commentary’ similar to what I have posted up for Galatians. This is incredibly time consuming – it takes me anywhere between 1-3 hours to comment on about 10 verses of text. It is ‘easy’ writing in once sense, i.e. I am not weighed down with the demands of writing a for publication volume and don’t really need to do all that much wide reading, but it just takes a lot of time to write very detailed comments on the Greek text. (Let alone the preparation I have to do to help my students understand Paul’s Greek in the Mongolian language).

But the long-term pay-off is certainly worth it. Having a self-written commentary is a highly productive way of organising one’s own thinking and notes for the future. I can just ‘refer to myself’ when I teach or preach upon the same material in the future.

Other

To be honest, I haven’t found time for anything else. I’ve been doing some tutoring here and there, very enjoyable, and try and squeeze some not-quite-on-topic reading in, but time is a scarce resource at the moment especially for side-projects. Once back from Mongolia I have a good 3.5 month block without large engagements or overseas travel, so I am optimistic that will be a very good working block.

How many languages do you speak/know/etc? Acquaintancy vs. Competency vs. Proficiency vs. Fluency

March 27, 2015 By thepatrologist in Language 1 Comment

It’s not infrequently that I get asked a version of the first question. It happened a week or so ago, a girl in my research office casually started conversation with, “So, how many language do you speak?”

My reaction varies a little based on the question, or more precisely the verb chosen in the question. Generally speaking, I don’t like to launch into a discourse on the difference between knowing/speaking/acquisition/etc.. That’s what this place is for!

I think one of the difficulties is that we have a Native Language concept that interfers or influences how we think about L2s. That is, we generally think we ‘know’ our L1(s), and treat them as a singular entity that is “known”. Even though, of course, Native speakers often don’t ‘know’ some things about their language, or make errors, or any number of things. Let’s not even get into the idea of idiolects and each language as an idealisation. We tend to think of Languages as Idealised Units, and knowledge as binary: you take a course of instruction and then you “know” TL. Even when we know this is wrong, we still have this tendency. We, ironically, need better vocabularies for talking about knowing Languages!

I like the term “Acquaintance” to mark any general knowledge about a language and an ability up through the beginner stages. It’s a useful tag for saying, “I’ve come into contact with TL (target Language), know a little bit about it and know a little bit of it.” It’s vague enough and humble enough to cover a wide range of levels below the rest. I would say that I’m acquainted with German, French, Italian, Spanish, and ‘well-acquainted’ with Biblical Hebrew.

Let’s skip forward to “fluency”. This is probably the most difficult term. It’s used for such a broad range of abilities. Bennie Lewis of Fi3M fame pins it as low as B2 (in his “Fluent in 3 Months, kindle loc. 674). I suspect most people think of it as higher than this, C1 at least. For most people, fluent means something close to Native-like: an ability to speak about a broad range of topics, in depth, without any errors that hinder communication. It’s, frankly, difficult to reach such a level for an L2, primarily because the sheer time to go from B2 to C1 and then to C2 is really quite vast, and requires a lot of time functioning in the L2. I rarely say I’m fluent in a language (except English!)

What’s between the two? I like to use the terms “competent” and “proficient”. Recently I’ve been reading Alice Omaggio’s Teaching Language in Context: Proficiency-Oriented Instruction, which is an interesting book for all sorts of reasons. Although these terms could be used interchangeably, or with various nuance, I treat ‘competent’ as lower than ‘proficient’; “competent” in my mind is someone who can understand the language without frequent miscommunication, and can manipulate the language to express what they want. It’s a lower-intermediate level. “Proficient” in my view is more what Bennie thinks of as “fluent” – they speaker has a mastery of competency, so to speak. They are able to discourse about a range of topics, and have socio-communicative strategies for managing when they are out of their depth. They are not near-Native, but they can function and survive in a wide array of TL settings, without needing to resort to their L1s.

Generally I would say I am competent in Gaelic. I would say I (was) proficient in Mongolian, though it’s probably slipping. Depending on audience I am usually happy to say I’m proficient in Ancient Greek and Latin. Primarily because, although my conversational skills are low, I am rarely called upon to speak in these languages, and my high level reading abilities mean I am equipped for what I do in them.

Of course, in an ideal language-learning world we would have unlocked all secrets and have a fast-track method for moving students rapidly from A1 to C2, from acquaintance to ‘fluency’. But we don’t, we just make up these labels to try and categorise a range of phenomena, our raw data on those times when we succeed or fail in communication, whether transmitting or receiving. What’s more important, in my view, is the simple principle of Language learning momentum, to keep moving forward rather than backward in one’s L2s.

Sometimes I just say 5 and move along with my day.

The interpreter’s task

March 25, 2015 By thepatrologist in Philology

The first thing an interpreter needs to do is to examine the text under consideration in order to establish the text. We call this the work of Textual Criticism.

Next, the interpreter must read the work. This involves understanding the correct phrasing of the text, and if necessary making decisions about appropriate breaks in words and phrases.

Third, the interpreter should move to analysis of the text at the level of grammar. They should explain the meaning of any difficult words, whether because they are rare, have heightened significance, or contain an ambiguity that must be discussed. They should also discuss the technical elements of grammar, illuminating any difficult constructions or explaining their sense. If the text is poetic, they should likewise give an account of its metrical features; if prose, they may give an account of elements of genre and discourse.

At this stage the interpreter may also relate the text to any historical issues, debating its relation with other historical texts, intertextuality, archaeology, and other findings of the scientific disciplines that may bear on our understanding of the text. They should also explain at the textual level the functioning of figures and tropes.

The last stage of the interpreter’s work is interpretation proper. Here they will explain not merely the meaning of the text, but its significance. What is the author’s purpose, how does the text function for its original audience, how has the text been understood and utilised since, how is it reframed in a canonical context, what is its theological significance, what does it teach us about God, Christ, and the history of salvation, how may believers today understand and appropriate it.

Does this sound like a reasonable description of, say, contemporary historico-grammatical exegesis? Because the outline I have just written is pretty much the template of literary studies in Late Antiquity. It’s what someone like Dionysius Thrax discusses briefly in his “Grammar”. It’s the methodology of that too-easily dismissed theologian, Origen. It’s a description that applies equally well to the so-called ‘Antiochene’ and ‘Alexandrian’ traditions.

I’m going to have a bit more to say on this shortly, but I am tossing around a few ideas at the moment. One is that a large chunk of what is being called ‘Nicene Culture’ is in fact just standard Late Antique literary studies, and what makes it Nicene is not as expansive as we sometimes take it for. Another is that the real difference between interpretative ‘schools’, ancient and modern, has very little to do with most of the above elements, and rather has to do with the area of interpretation of figures, tropes, and non-literal referents. More on this in a forthcoming post.

Why accents matter

March 23, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek 4 Comments

In this post I want to talk about why I think learning accents for Ancient Greek is important, and shouldn’t be put off.

The Case Against

First, let’s consider a case against accents. In Duff, “The Elements of New Testament Greek”, we are given three reasons:

1. Accents were not present in written Greek in the New Testament period.

2. The rules of accentuation are complicated, and you have enough to learn.

3. Accents don’t help you translate or understand Greek.

Duff immediately recognises that 3 is not strictly true, there are a few cases where accentuation does matter. However I am not convinced that 1 and 2 are really good reasons either. To discuss 1, I think this is a false appeal to NT writing. We don’t read 1st century manuscript writing anyway. Unless you do papyrus work, most students aren’t doing that. Most scholars aren’t doing that. So to be truly consistent on point 1, shouldn’t you teach Majuscule texts with no word divisions, and instruct students how to make word divisions on their own? I don’t think an appeal to 1st century “authenticity” will work on one basis (writing) when used to argue against another basis (pronunciation).

I also think 2 is a very poor pedagogical principle. It does match very well with what Duff writes on p1, that the aim of the book is “[t] help you learn enough Greek to read the New Testament”. That is a very truncated goal in itself. The NT is, give or take, 138,020 Greek words. That’s like one of the later books in the Song of Ice and Fire, or an overly long PhD dissertation. Imagine you learnt enough of a language to read one dissertation and that was it. How odd, we would say.

Principle 2 would, in my view, be equivalent to ‘admitting’, “hey, Greek is hard, it’s a language, and languages are hard, let’s teach you just enough to act like you almost knew Greek”.

A Case For

Here’s why I think accents should be taught from day 1:

Greek was not a ‘written-only’ language; there exist a very few languages that are designed not to be spoken, and Greek is not one of them. So that should remind us that there is an interplay between a once-spoken language and its written representation. Accent marks were added later, yes, but they were added to preserve information that is present in spoken Greek, and this is particularly useful to learners.

Latin actually provides a really good parallel here. We know that Latin has a distinction between short and long vowels: a, e, i, o, u, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū. But Latin writing doesn’t use macrons, only we do, in learner’s texts. Why didn’t Latin writing use macrons (in general, that is)? Because this information didn’t need to be marked – if you learnt to speak Latin you knew, by the sound, what was a long and what was a short vowel. But here is what’s key: vowel length carries semantic significance. Not always, and I’m sure L2 speakers made Latin blunders all the time and were yet understood, but est and ēst are two different words.

English readers generally have difficulty taking note of diacritical marks on letters, because we are used to operating in a Latin script that doesn’t utilise them, and in English they aren’t tremendously meaningful, because we, who speak English, already know how to pronounce English words. Though actually English proununciation is hell on earth.

Learning accentuation in Greek is forcing you to learn how to pronounce words accented correctly. It is an authenticity criterion just like Duff’s principle 1 is, but it goes the opposite direction: learn to accent correctly and you could read unaccented text fine, learn to read unaccented text and you will always struggle to accent correctly (like most of us!).

Hebrew vowel pointing provides a partial analogy. Everyone learns vowel pointing for Biblical Hebrew. Then, when you read an unpointed text, you can usually work out what’s going on. No one learns to read unpointed Hebrew, unless they learn to speak Hebrew in which case the Hebrew ‘is’ pointed, i.e. the vowel information is already encoded into the speaker’s mind.

It’s much harder to learn accentuation later. That’s because we treat it as ‘extra’ and so ‘extraneous’ data. By teaching it from day 1, we teach is as significant and as semantic, it carries differences in meaning that actually matter in the Greek, which is why if we’re actually teaching the Greek language, and not just hoping to pass a grammar exam and forget about Greek until the next sermon insight comes along, I argue for accents from the start.

How do you ‘fix’ textbooks? (with some thoughts on Aspect in Greek)

March 20, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek, Pedagogy 2 Comments

I mean, the answer is kind of simple. You edit and reprint them. If you’re the author.

I’ve had occasion this week to consult what Mounce, that most widely used Greek textbook, says about aspect.

Similarly, I also dipped into Duff. Now Duff is unfortunately a revision of Wenham which is a revision of Nunn. I’m sure some places out there are still using Wenham. I hope no one is still using Nunn! Duff’s 3rd edition from 2005 discusses Greek verbs on p66. It begins with tenses, and at least discusses aspect, saying that verbs encode both time and aspect. It lists the aspects like this:

Present tense: process or undefined
Future: undefined
Imperfect: process
Aorist: undefined

It also says that undefined is either ‘undefined’ or punctiliar in contrast to process.

I won’t hammer Duff on other issues (deponency, for one), at least today.

The perfect doesn’t appear in Duff until 16.1 (p179), he says the aspect is “completion”, which isn’t too far off, really. And he says the time is past and present, which is a little confusing I would think.

My problem with Duff is that the terminology is inconsistent, and that the presentation of aspect is muddled. Although I think Campbell is wrong about the perfect, one very helpful thing he achieved was to disentangle aspect from Aktionsart and to help people think of these separately. Punctiliar is a type of action, aktionsart, it doesn’t help us to use it for an aspect. “Undefined” is not a helpful label for an aspect, because it actually doesn’t tell you anything. The aorist tense-form is aoristic, i.e. undefined, but only in the language of Greek grammarians. In our language ‘undefined’ could be perfective or imperfective!

There are things we might disagree about, and there are things we just need to get clear. For instance, I think Duff is just wrong about the Present being ‘either’ “process or undefined”. But I think there are a number of things that have become reasonably clear in the last few years, and NT textbooks could serve us all well by revising themselves for their next reprint.

Adopt a clear terminology of, say, perfective vs. imperfective, divorce time from aspect, get rid of deponency language, and then use a clear terminology to state points of ‘position’.

Decker does this pretty well in his work, I don’t see why a revised Mounce or Duff couldn’t do likewise. If you want to say that time is encoded in verbs tense-forms, fine, just state it clearly. If you want to say that the perfect is imperfective in aspect, fine, just make it clear that that’s what your textbook is doing. Conflating categories and muddling terminology is not helping students in this field and isn’t going to set them up well for later on.

Software for ‘reading’ foreign language texts (2)

March 18, 2015 By thepatrologist in Language Tags: FLTR, Languages, LWT, Pedagogy, Reading, Software, Tools 1 Comment

Okay, Let’s look at Learning with Texts, and how to get set up and going with it.

A lot of information in this post is totally derived from this post over at DIY Classics. I 100% tell you to go and read that post. My aim is to supplement that post by giving some more specific details and talking through some of the details of FLTR and how to use the two sites.

Your first port of call should be the LWT page, which is full of a lot of information, including what to do if you want to set up your own localised version, which involves running a server version of it. That’s not most of us, and so thankfully Benny of “Fluent in 3 Months” fame runs a free hosting service. So next stop is to go to his website:

http://www.fluentin3months.com/wp-login.php?action=register

and register a username and password, then use this to go to:

http://lwtfi3m.co/

and use it to log in.

For all the set-up details, follow the rest of that post as DIY Classics (though note point 5 below), here is the link again. But if you are feeling lazy and want to stay here, here’s a brief run-down:

Click on my Languages
Click on the Green plus sign or ‘New Language’ and add Latin/Greek
For dictionary, you want to add:

Latin: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?la=la&l=###

Greek: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?la=gr&l=###

I would delete the Google Translate URI because it doesn’t exist for Ancient Greek, and isn’t good for Latin.

For Character Substitutions: ´=’|`=’|’=’|’=’|…=…|..=‥|«=|»=
Especially for Greek, you want:

RegExp Split Sentences: .!?:;•

RegExp Word Characters: a-zA-ZÀ-ÖØ-öø-ȳͰ-Ͽἀ-ῼ

These two values make sure that LWT correctly works out (a) what starts and ends words, and (b) make sure it uses the Unicode set that includes polytonic Greek characters. Both are important in getting Greek to display and function properly. Notice that the RegExp Word Characters is different from what DIY Classics said; I found that didn’t work for me.

Select your Language from the home screen
Click “My Texts”
Click “New Text”, and enter a title, paste in your text, and tag it as you please.

Okay, you should be all set up for Greek and or Latin. Once you’ve done that, go to “read”, it’s the first icon listed on the text page. You’ll get a screen with 4 components:

In the top left is your LWT menu. Notice that it lists 839 “To Do” – those are untagged/unknown words in the text. Next to it is an “I know all” button. Basically click this is you know every single word in a text and couldn’t be bothered tagging them.

Below this is the reading pane. In this is the text you’re working with. You can see in the first screen shot that I’ve left-clicked on ἀπόστολος, which has given me several options.

In the top right pane I’ve got the option to edit this term; it’s listed as a new term, and I can add in both a translation, as well as some tags, perhaps I would add: noun, masculine, nominative, singular. Romaniz is for a Romanisation of foreign alphabets. At the bottom is a coloured status bar: 1-5 of unknown to well-known, then “WKn” for actually so well known you don’t want to worry about it ever again, and “Ign” for Ignore this term, useful if your text contains non words or words not in your target language.

The bottom right pane that’s opened up is the dictionary look up, based on what you listed in Dictionary 1 in the settings. In this case, it’s gone to Perseus just like I told it too. The bottom frame just works like an inset webpage, so you can click through to the LSJ or Middle Liddell entry as you please.

Foreign Language Text Reader

I also want to talk about Foreign Language Text Reader (FLTR). FLTR is like a slimmer, maybe-dumber, version of LWT. But its two greatest strengths are that it’s on your computer (without running a server!) and that it’s super simple.

For FLTR head to https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltr/

Follow the download and installation instructions, they are pretty straightforward.

Open up the program and you’ll see a very basic interface.

First you’ll want to find the line of options that starts with Language, click on New, type in your language, say “Greek”, and then we want to edit the settings for the language.

Pretty much the settings are the same as for LWT, so here’s what I use for for Greek:

Char Substitutions: ´=’|`=’|’=’|’=’|…=…|..=‥|«=|»=

WordCharRegExp: a-zA-ZÀ-ÖØ-öø-ȳͰ-Ͽἀ-ῼ

DictionaryURL1: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?la=gr&l=###

You may want to come back and increase the text size later as well. I find the default is often too small.

Then you need to add some texts. Personally, I add them via this method:

Each language will have a subfolder wherever you installed FLTR, open this up, and you’ll find a folder like Greek_Texts; save a text file (*.txt) in UTF-8 format in here, and you can use it in FLTR. So, for example, grab a copy of say, 1 Peter, put it into a text editor, switch to UTF-8, and then save to here. Open up FLTR, select Greek, and then select the text. If it hasn’t appeared, click refresh and double-check for it in the right folder. Here’s a screen-shot of some Greek text open with FLTR:

You can see that I haven’t used it a lot with Greek, as most of the text is blue, which means a new word you haven’t tagged. Green words are well-known, Yellow words are level 4, pretty well known; the colours shade down to a red which is level 1-2 not very well known. A left click will bring up two pages:

Firstly it will bring up the editing screen for that word, and you can edit this with relevant information; it will also open in a web browser the linked dictionary. A right click on a word brings up a smaller dialogue box, and I can edit from there as well, without having it force open the web-browser/dictionary option. Here’s another screenshot with a short text about Bonnie Prince Charlie in Gaelic; you can see I’ve worked both with Gaelic and with this text before, because most of the text is coloured in.

What’s the point? Or, Pros and Cons

A student helpfully asked me how this was better/different to using, say, morphologically tagged Bible-software, a la Accordance, BibleWorks, Logos, etc..

It’s personalised, and testable. Every entry is put in by you, and so it’s filled with whatever you wanted to include.
It’s geared towards reading and familiarity. It doesn’t mindlessly tell me all the information for each word as I scroll my cursor across, it colour-codes to how well I know the word, and what information I have included.
It’s faster than doing this manually. Reader’s editions are great, writing on paper is great. This lets you tag your own texts digitally, and it saves those tags across languages, which is great when you’ve encountered a word once, and then find it again 3 years later in a difficult text.
It’s easy to work with the same interface across multiple languages. This is my preferred way of dealing with foreign texts. I use it for Gaelic, Mongolian, French, German, Italian, and am exploring its use for Greek and Latin.

Cons:

There’s no real way to do actual morphological tagging. So every inflection of ἀπόστολος is going to be a separate entry. LWT does nothing to alleviate this. FLTR does have a little drop down when you’re entering a new word that lists similar words, so if you have entered, say, a different form of the word, you can more or less copy what you had elsewhere. I suspect there isn’t an easy way to fix this, since you would need some way of teaching the software to do morphology for multiple user-inputted languages.
It’s slow to get started. Opening up 1 Peter and seeing 839 new words to tag, if you already have some experience in Koine, is not a thrilling experience, because this takes time. If you were starting from scratch in a language, it would be more rewarding. But if you’re already ‘on the way’, then it’s slow to get going. But it pays off. This week I opened up a new Gaelic text I’d never tackled, and at least 90% of words were already tagged. This is the pay-off.

Conclusion:

So that’s it. I’d be interested in your feedback, if you’ve had some experience or if you go and try it yourself now. Let me know if you have any difficulties in set-up or need a hand.

Tips and Advanced usage

Tip #1: You can select a string of words as a group; this is great if you want to tag a whole phrase that, for instance, might function idiomatically.

Tip #2: FLTR allows you to select “Vocabulary” as a text. This will let you filter a range of vocabulary by ‘knownness’, from a specific text or all texts, with a number of entries, sorted either alphabetically, by status, or random.

Tip #3: You can also access your FLTR vocab as two sets of files in your main FLTR directory, one is a plain text, say Greek_Export.txt, while the other will be a comma separated version, Greek_Words.csv. These files aren’t very useful to look at, but they are the same as the LWT TSV export, so you can actually move between the two programs.

Tip #4: You can import these exported files (from FLTR or LWT) into an Anki deck, if that’s how you like to operate.

The Middle Voice (Greek): Thoughts and Pedagogy

March 16, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek Tags: Greek, Middle, Pedagogy 6 Comments

Recently I’ve been thinking and reading more about the middle voice. It was first occasioned by some by-the-way comments in Aubrey’s thesis, p204-6. There he gives a typological table derived from Kemmer. Also, in some email exchange, he suggested I check out R.J. Allen’s doctoral thesis, “The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek. A study in Polysemy”, as well as Rachel Aubrey’s forthcoming thesis dealing with it.

I also had the chance to think about the middle in my “Methods” class, since the 1st year students are just hitting the issue of voice, and so I had the opportunity to interact with 2nd and 3rd years students and talk about the difficulty of teaching Greek voice.

I’m going to briefly summarise the typology of the middle voice that you find in Kemmer and Allen. Allen basically gives us 11 or 12 categories:

Passive Middle: The Patient has subject status
Spontaneous Process Middle: the subject undergoes an internal change of (physical) state.
Mental Process Middle: The subject experiences a mental affectedness.
Body Motion Middle: The subject causes a change of physical position to themself.
Collective Motion Middle: The (plural) subjects move, i.e. gathering or dispersing.
Reciprocal Middle: The (plural) subjects act so that A does to B what B does to A.
Direct reflexive middle: The subject acts upon themself, usually in a habitual/customary action.
Perception Middle: The subject perceives by means of the senses and so is both agent and experiencer.
Mental Activity Middle: The subject acts within and upon their own mind, and so is both agent and experiencer (and possibly patient). This differs from 3 in that 9 is more reflexive, whereas in 3 the process may have an external stimulus.
Speech act middle: The subject acts as speaker, but is involved also as beneficiary or experiencer.
Indirect Reflexive Middle: The subject performs a transitive action but also functions as beneficiary of the action.
At some point, Allen seems to treat δύναμαι as a distinct group.

I think having this kind of typology helps a student in their intermediate stages see how middles “involve the subject”, rather than the often place-holder explanations given in a beginner’s course. In each of these, except 1, you can begin to understand how the subject of the verb also takes a role as patient, experiencer, or beneficiary. This helps relate how these ideas are “middle” in the ‘logic’ of the Greek language.

It also helps to explain why deponency is a bad explanation for middle-only verbs. Middle-only verbs are ‘middle’ in the internal-logic of the Greek. We would call them middle verb-forms with middle ‘meaning’. It’s only in, say, English, that they are “middle in form but active in translation”. Translation and native-language meaning are two different things here.

One of the problems, pedagogically, is that when the middle voice is introduced in most textbooks, they have a fairly unclear way of explaining what to do with it. Basically, students are usually told: look at the active meaning of the verb, and come up with a way to ‘make it middle’. This doesn’t really help that much, I would say. It’s often better to (a) look up the word in a lexicon and check if there’s an entry for the middle, (b) consider the context of the word and how middleness might function, (c) if you’re a “think of the category” type person, having the kind of typology above would help you actually think through the various options.

The other thing about Allen’s thesis that’s nice is that it is about the diachronic changes in Greek, and he maps out some of the shift of the θη passive stem. I think it’s deadly confusing for Koine students in particular to talk about the passive as the passive. I can see now why it is that textbooks call this a passive stem; I would conjecture that it’s because when θη appears, it appears as a subset of the middle voice, but particularly expressing category 1, the true passive. But English learners function with an active/passive dichotomy, and so are more likely to overstate the passivity of the middle category. Learning/teaching that the passive is a subset of the middle helps to dislodge this idea.

On page 110, and 123, Allen has a couple of diagrams that show how, chronologically, the θη stem is ‘eating up’ other middle usages, a trajectory that continues beyond classical Greek, into the Koine period and beyond, until the middle gets devoured. θη is like the ‘cancer of the middle voice’ that cannibalises and colonises the other usages. Realising this for NT students is important because the passive marker isn’t distinctly passive and so does not necessarily carry exegetical significance. I think R. Buth made this point somewhere about ἐγείρω and the form ἠγέρθη(ν). (Sorry, I can’t recall where, and apologies if it wasn’t Buth). What’s the difference between Christ “being raised” and Christ “arose” (in the middle sense)? The θη doesn’t tell you which is meant. Exegetical restraint demands that you don’t try and make a theological point from a grammatical feature that won’t ‘bear that weight’.

What to do in the classroom? I’m still figuring that out. I think, personally, that I would go with these things though:

Teach two voices: Active and Subject-Reflexive.
Teach the passive as a subset of S-R.
Teach θη as an alternate middle stem, and give some reading material for advanced/interested students explaining its history.
Teach middle-only forms as just middle only, without making a big deal out of them.

Software for ‘reading’ foreign language texts (1)

March 13, 2015 By thepatrologist in Language 3 Comments

So, particularly if you’ve come from a Greek/Latin/Classics background, most of what one is taught is how to do a lot of intensive reading. Intensive reading involves talking relatively small segments of texts and analysing, grammatically, each word and segment, mentally parsing and tagging things, and then understanding how the clause and sentence and paragraph fits together.

There’s a place for that. But it’s generally not the best way to move towards a more fluent reading approach. On the other hand, the grammar-translation approach almost never employs something at the other end of the spectrum, extensive reading (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensive_reading). There’s lots of good material and research arguing for the efficacy of extensive reading.

One of the barriers for reading particularly classical languages is that there is simply not enough and not appropriate enough texts for reading. There aren’t really graded readers, Lingua Latina being a sole exception. There certainly aren’t extensive series of readers pitched at stable levels designed to move readers slowly and surely to greater proficiency and expand their vocabulary. And, a great gap is that there isn’t any YA literature. YA literature, I would say, is actually amazingly important; it’s language is just a step below ‘adult’ literature, but it’s interesting (usually) and engaging and adults can read it with genuine enjoyment while at a slightly lower language level.

Anyway, to read extensively in a way that works requires a fairly high level of comprehension. One needs to be recognising upwards of 90% of what’s going on in order to figure out the other 10% from context. Maybe more, maybe less. Certainly there’s a point at which there are two many unknowns and the reader gets lost.

So what if there are no texts suitable for your reading level? This is where I think some reading tools will help a great deal. Basically, we want to remove the barriers that slow reading down to the point of frustration. The main difficulty to be overcome is vocabulary – how do we raise our vocabulary to a level where more and more is comprehensible? What if we accelerated and integrated the ability to look up words, and if we made readily available on the same reading ‘page’ the meanings of every word we’ve ever encountered? That is the premise of the reading software I’ll be looking at in the next two posts. By recording and tagging *every single word*, you can see at a glance what you know, what you have previously encountered, and what you’ve never encountered.

If someone is mainly working with texts that have already been tagged to death, i.e. biblical texts, classical texts in the Perseus collection, then maybe something like this isn’t so necessary, but once you’re outside those corpora, essentially one is tagging one’s own texts. This is a digital way to do it across texts, instead of covering a sheet of paper in notes (I’m sure plenty of us have done that), or some ad hoc software solutions.

In my next post I’ll talk through Learning with Texts and Foreign Language Text Reader

Gaelic, the present tense and ‘X is Y’

March 11, 2015 By thepatrologist in Gaelic

I was having a chat the other day to someone about differences between Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) and Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic), and also some of the issues with the grammar introduction sequencing in Duolingo.

Duolingo, as far as I can tell, built its core model tree on mapping English to the main European languages: Spanish, French, Italian, and German. In quite a few of those languages, the Present tense doubles as a Present continuous/progressive. So English “I eat” and “I am eating” can both be, say, “(Io) mangio” in Italian. Usually English speakers don’t have *too* much problem with this. Similarly, in most of those languages, the Present tense is fairly simple morphologically. So the first few lessons involve the present tense, and later on in the DL learning trees, you encounter other tenses. Participles come quite late.

Though, if you’re an English speaker, you don’t actually use the present tense for present continuous/progressive actions. You use the Present tense primarily for habitual/gnomic statements. “I eat cheese” is a habitual/general statement. We use participles, “I am eating” to form our present continuous/instantaneous tense.

This is problematic if one were to build a Gàidhlig course, because Gàidhlig doesn’t have a present tense except for the two “to be” verbs. So it’s actually quite difficult to build a course that starts with the ‘present general/habitual’ tense, so this would in fact be the non-past a.k.a. future/habitual tense. Most Gàidhlig courses teach the ‘to be’ verbs first and then introduce the ‘participle’ (actually a verbal noun), since all progressive/continuous tenses are formed with this combination of periphrastic tense.

At the same time, when you look at Direct Method readers of the kind of which I am so fond, one of the fundamental structures is something like “This is a boy”, “Donald is a man”, etc, X is Y. Unfortunately, Gàidhlig has what appears to be a grammatically complex way of expressing this. Firstly, there are two verbs to express “to be”, as in some other languages, but secondly the type of expression is varied based on whether the “Y” component is (i) adjective, (ii) definite noun, (iii) indefinite noun. And since people often want to start with (iii), this becomes:

‘Se duine a th’ ann an Dòmhnall

In literal English: It is a man that is “in” Donald.

If you parse out that sentence, it’s:

Contraction (Se + e), which is Copula Verb Is + pronoun marker e

noun: duine (man)

relative pronoun: a (who/that)

verb: tha (“to be”)

preposition: ann an (in, used existentially for phrases of the type “there is X)

noun: Dòmhnall (proper noun)

(This is part of a strong tendency to use cleft-structures and fronting in Gaelic, if you’re wondering)

That’s not easy to grammar out, certainly not for a beginner, but it’s the standard way to say X is Y (indefinite noun).

These two reasons are part of the reason I’ve never really embarked on writing a Direct Method reader for Gàidhlig. You would just have to start differently to circumvent these two issues which lead to accelerated complexity at just the very point one doesn’t want such complexity.

Hunting with Where are your Keys?

February 24, 2015 By thepatrologist in Language Tags: AAR, German, WAYK

I had an interesting (new) wayk experience over the weekend, and thought I would share it with you this week. Most of the time that I’m using WAYK it’s to try and communicate pieces of language to someone else. That is, I’m in the role of a teacher, and I’m trying to give bite-sized-pieces to a learner to assimilate and acquire language.

But that is only one side of the equation with wayk – you can equally use the techniques of wayk to obtain language when you’re a learner. Because ‘all’ wayk is is a set of techniques to facilitate and accelerate language acquisition. So over the weekend I sat down with a friend of mine, who is a non-native but fluent German speaker (former German teacher, lived in Germany, has a German wife). He was my ‘fluent-fool’ for the session.

I explained very briefly what I was going to do, and then set up a table. To be fair, I already had some vocabulary and grammar and initial sentences, and knowing “Was ist das?” probably really helped too, but other than that my German is really at a low level.

It was very interesting once we shifted into German. He quickly understood generally what I was trying to do, and specifically what I was trying to elicit. I did have a prop problem in that I didn’t set up red-pen/black-pen clearly, and so I could draw out adjectives from him. At the same time, the difference in types of pens that I had on the table launched him into a fully German explanation of different words for ‘pen’ in German!

One of the things I appreciated was that he mainly stayed in our target language, and would often go on in Deutsch for quite a while. I think in different contexts the learner would need to control this, but for me it was entertaining, and mostly comprehensible. When I wanted to bring it back to earth, I would just go back to constructing simple sentences to check ‘is this right?’

A couple of times he veered into English language grammar explanation. Again, for me this was fine, partly because I don’t mind learning grammar, partly because of the informality of our session. I think in a more focused series I would want to encourage him back into the German more frequently.

One of my reflections is that when you stay in the TL, and you’re trying to elicit certain structures, it really becomes apparent more quickly when things aren’t going to plan. I.e. you had a bad set-up, you can’t get the piece of language you want, and you can’t express what it is you’re trying to elicit. So much is about set-up, get it right and you’ll get the language you’re hunting.

Theory Friday: Flashcards

February 20, 2015 By thepatrologist in Language Tags: Discussion, Flaschards, Methods, SLA 6 Comments

One of my sidelines this year is to tutor an hour a week for students who are tutoring other students in introductory Greek. It always seems complicated to explain that. We are only in our second week, and in fact the student-tutors have not yet commenced their tutoring of their students, so we have taken the opportunity to do a little bit of meta-thinking about language acquisition/teaching and methods. Of course, you know this is just the kind of thing I like to do.

What follows is a post-factum write-up of some of the things I covered.

This week we spent some time thinking and talking through Flashcards. Good old flashcards!

What is the quintessence of the flashcard, physical or digital? I take it, that it is the direct correspondence of one discrete unit of information with another. This is both the genius and the weakness of the flashcard approach. For, the flashcard can never get away from this 1:1 correspondence model, even when it becomes something like X:y,z,a,b,c – it is still operating on a correspondence model. At the same time, this segmentation and compartmentalisation is what allows it to work so well for massive rote-processing. Once we accept this limitation, we can think through two related questions:

How do we mitigate the traditional weaknesses of flashcards?
How do we complement the use of flashcards for better learning outcomes?

I’ve gone back and forth on flashcard use. I think that overall they are an inferior method of learning vocabulary in general. But they do have their uses, which is why I swing back to using them occasionally. Their advantage is that they allow massive rote learning of vocabulary by a relatively automatic process. This is very useful for initial stages, at which constructing materials or finding texts that allow high comprehension is difficult. This is one reason flashcards should, in general, be built on corpus frequency – high frequency vocab initially acquired by flashcards can rapidly be both solidified and nuanced by extensive comprehensible input.

The weaknesses of flashcards include some of the following:

Encouraging a correspondence/translation approach to language
Reinforce native-language thinking patterns
Present words in a decontextualized manner
Prioritise Visual-Textual learning processes
Ineffective for structures

Point 1 is the most difficult, because of the quintessence of flashcards. I think it best to mitigate this through complementary approaches. Point 3 can be mitigated by including contextual information on one side of the ‘card’ – a sentence, clause, or even a phrase, can contextual new information in a way that provides more language-oriented material than just ‘mental factoid’ gloss. This sentence or phrase should be relatively simple, it should be something the learner can process without any great mental difficulty – i.e. they shouldn’t operate in a sentence beyond what the learner is already comfortable with and the rest of the words should be familiar and immediately understood.

Point 4 and point 2 can be mitigated in relatively complementary ways: by replacing native-language glosses with pictures, and/or using audio information. Pictures have two downsides: they require a very large ‘up-front’ cost in generating a deck with relevant pictures (I’m thinking digitally here), and specificity of pictures can be problematic. One has to think carefully how to use a picture to represent a concept in a way that is non-ambiguous. I’ve never seen an audio-to –text deck, but I think it would be brilliant, if one whole ‘side’ of the deck were just audio material. I suppose the extreme would be audio-to-pictures.

Point 5 has to do with things like untranslatable particles/modal markers, etc., things that need to be understood as part of a larger unit. In Greek ἄν is my default example. Practically useless on a flashcard. This can be mitigate by embedding these kinds of words/structures into sentence level units and highlighting/underling/otherwise marking the targeted information. The learner then is responding to some actual language use, while being reminded of the target information.

On to my second question, how to complement flash-cards. As I said earlier, flashcards are really like intense boot-camp for acquiring a basic vocabulary. Personally, I think they make best sense when used solo, when other materials are not available. I would complement it by carefully constructed graded reading material, which is going to establish contextually comprehensible input and increase reading proficiency, and verbal practice of some sort. Flashcards would then be used to pass your time on the bus or something, reinforcing this basic information in another form. Next time I’ll talk about intensive and extensive reading practice and gradation.

Would love to hear your thoughts/experiences/relevant research on the topic of flashcards.

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (6)

February 12, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek Tags: Aspect, Aubrey, Greek, Linguistics, Perfect, RRG

Chapter 5 of Aubrey’s thesis returns to the stratosphere, as he takes the analysis done on the perfect in Koine Greek and then considers what this has to say/contribute to how RRG works as an approach for linguistics. Particularly, he wants to consider how the Bybee-Dahl approach of look at grams without prejudging meta-categories of aspect/tense/mood, can mesh with Bhat’s typology of looking at languages in terms of A/T/M prominence. An initial diagrammatic relaisation of that is given on p138. This realisation itself has problems, in that it is an idealisation. A more concrete, though still rather abstract, diagram of Koine Greek comes on p140.

p141 offers a diagram that goes back to typology of verbal operators in RRG. Can the approach to categories presented in Aubrey’s synthesis of Bybee-Dahl-Bhat be realised within this typology? Aubrey says perhaps not, and perhaps it’s not necessary anyway.

If you’re after some key pay-off for understanding Greek, p143 has some good material. Aubrey says that the perfect, like the future, is a peripheral category, and that as such they “are not inherently tense or aspect”. As far as this analysis goes, the perfect functions within the aspect system, because Greek is aspect prominent. The future appears ambiguous, because it almost doesn’t know whether it’s aspectual or temporal.

Chapter 6 is the Conclusion chapter, and if you’ve been lost, here is a chance to catch up. I’d like to emphasise the first sentence here, “The goal of this thesis was not so much to solve a problem, but to fill in a gap.” (p145) Aubrey’s thesis doesn’t ‘solve’ the Greek perfect, it seeks to expand the usefulness of RRG for certain areas of language description. But obviously this thesis has important implications for understanding Koine Greek. Indeed, note the sentence on p150 under “Possibilities for future research”, where he says, “If we evaluate the grammars of the past century in terms of Chomsky’s types of linguistic adequacy, they fail to even meet the standard of descriptive adequacy, much less explanatory adequacy.” ouch.

I won’t offer a read-through of the two appendices. Appendix A lists of all the verbs examined and their predicate classes. It is worth reading, because of the way it helps you understand that typology of predicate classes and how it relates to actual verbs and the actual research Aubrey has done.

Appendix B is probably of more interest to my general (minute) readership. It is an overview of the Greek verbal system. Why do you need to read this? Because probably all you have read is those inadequate grammars we mentioned above! The overview here is “independent of the traditional grammatical tradition in terms of categories and terminology” (p187) and so well worth your reading.

And that’s a wrap. Take home message: Greek perfects are resultative/completive grams operating in the aspect system. Or, to uncover Aubrey’s view of aspect from Appendix B (p199):

The Koine Greek verbal system has three aspects: perfective, imperfective, and perfect. The perfective aspect makes no reference to internal temporal structure and is contextually bounded in its interpretation. The imperfective refers to temporal internal structure that is incomplete. It is contextually unbounded. If it appears in a clause with a goal periphery, there is nothing to suggest the goal was achieved. Lastly the perfect aspect refers to internal temporal structure that is either completed (completive) or exists as achieved state (resultative). It is inherently telic and will either assign an endpoint to a situation or event or denote the resultant state of that situation or event. As such, the perfect is both telic and bounded.

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (5)

February 10, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek Tags: Aspect, Aubrey, Greek, Linguistics, Perfect, RRG

Apologies that these come out slowly, I am mostly busy trying to get a paper written by month’s end. Here are links to the earlier posts: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Today we’re picking up at 4.2.3, which deals with “Gram-specific tests part II: Predicate classes”. Probably you’ve had a mental blank and have no idea what Aubrey is talking about. Basically what Aubrey does in this section is take the idea of “anteriors” (indicating a thing that happened prior to another thing, “resultatives” (indicating that an action with a goal (a telic predicate) has created a new state (result), and “completives” (indicating that an action has, you guessed it, come to its inherent end point).

In this section Aubrey goes through Greek perfects and looks at how they match up with these gram types: First he looks at State Predicates (verbs that indicate a state of being); he finds that generally they do not appear in the perfect. The main contrast he does find is Type IV grammatical contrasts (i.e. the difference in forms means that the event is conceptualised differently). In which the perfect indicates entrance into the state. he also finds some involve an “intensive usage” indicating that the participant “experience[es] the state to the highest degree” (p99). Verbs with a meaning of strong emotion are also found in the perfect with such an intensive sense. Generally speaking, these findings correlated with resultative and completive ideas.

The other set of atelic predicates (semelfactives and activity), are easier to talk about. Semelfactives basically do not appear in the perfect. Activity predicates generally only appear in the perfect as active achievements with an endpoint. I.e. you don’t get “marched” in the perfect, but you do get “marched to the city”. This is followed by some stuff about negative clauses which we will skip today.

The next section (4.2.3.2) deals with telic predicates. i.e. verbs which involve or end with a change of state. Following the RRG typology, Aubrey looks through achievements, active achievements, and accomplishments. If you forgot what those are, you can revise them in my first post in this series.

Active achievements involve an activity that has a duration, and then a change fo state (the achievement) that is instantaneous. You find Greek perfects with this idea. You do not find Greek perfects (usually) with Activity predicates (the activity with a duration, but no change of state at the end of it).

I walked or I was walking are activities.

I walked to the park is an active achievement.

Aubrey finds that only when an activity is given a specific (object) or end point is it likely to appear in the perfect rather than the perfective. He also finds the perfect used for “exhaustive” completion of an activity, and in conjunction with voice that the perfect middle is used “to refer to the achieved state of an active achievement”, a role the imperfective middle will not do.

Overall this section also supports the idea that resultatives and completives are dominant in comparison to anteriors.

Aubrey then goes on to look at achievements and accomplishments. This too supports the above conclusion. Finally this chapter looks at causatives along the same lines.

I have skimmed over a lot of examples and argumentation in this chapter to basically give an overview of what is discussed and what is found. In the conclusion of this chapter, Aubrey affirms that the Greek perfect is not anterior but is split between resultatives and completives. His tests have some relevance for adjusting the tests themselves, and how this typology may fit with RRG as well.

What does this mean for how you understand the perfect in Greek?

“In sum, the Greek perfect is a synthetic verbal morpheme that patterns with other aspect morphemes and thus functions in the nuclear layer of the operator projection. Semantically, the morpheme conveys both resultative and completive meaning, depending on both the predicate being used and also the context of the predication. On many occasions, particularly with perfects derived from accomplishments and achievements, it is almost impossible to choose between resultative and completive readings.” (p131).

State of the Projects, February 2015

February 4, 2015 By thepatrologist in Updates 1 Comment

Wow, January flew past! I suppose two weeks of Greek school and one of Latin would do that.

PhD

I’ve settled into my desk space at university and begun to find my place in the research again. My desk is covered in books and a couple of computer screens, and I think I’m moving back to the point where I know what I’m talking about, which is great. It looks like I’m going to aim to present two papers this year, so hoping that (a) they get done and (b) they get accepted and (c) I don’t get hammered into oblivion if (a) and (b) occur.

Teaching

I had hoped to get some online groups off the ground, but I didn’t quite have enough interest, so that is on hold for now. I will be in at Moore college doing some work on tutoring tutors: helping 2nd and 3rd year students mentor 1st year students through Greek. This is exciting apart from the ill-fated persistence of Erasmian pronunciation.

Patristic Readers

I’ve just finished revising Polycarp and will upload a revised version shortly. I have some revisions to make to Perpetua as well. I’ve also completed 1/3 of the work for the 2nd reader, and now that things are more settled I think I’ll make good progress on that.

Not happening

I haven’t had much chance to do any audio or video recording lately, but it’s something I’d like to get back to. I’d also like to get back to the Greek Natural Reader text.

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (4)

February 2, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek Tags: Aspect, Aubrey, Greek, Linguistics, Perfect, RRG 3 Comments

Okay, if you’re coming at this from a Koine Greek angle like me, we’re now getting to the good stuff. In chapter 4 Aubrey takes his methodological work and begins to apply it specifically to the Greek perfect. Firstly, he reviews some of the disagreements about the perfect, and this is actually really helpful to. For example, he talks about the Perfect as historically a derivation of a PIE stative verb that is generally agreed in the Homeric period to be a resultative type gram. There is less agreement about the shift into Classical Greek, with most agreeing that it came to be a kind of anterior gram, but little consensus about when this took place, McKay puts it as late as Byzantine Greek! As for the Koine period, there’s no consensus at all. Fanning sees it as a state-predicate, Porter treats it as stative but then goes out on a limb and says that stativity is its own aspect. Evans and Campbell are the most extreme, claiming that it is in fact imperfective in aspect. What’s a poor Greek scholar to do!

Well, Aubrey says let’s go ahead and apply the methodology and tests previsouly outlined. p83 has a useful table that talks about Greek morphemes in a way maybe you hadn’t thought about before. Put the root in the middle: λυ, now what can come immediately after that? 3 options: nothing, σ, or κ, so this is a 3-way contrast between imperfective, perfective, and perfect. Note that the aorist and the future are marked by sigma for perfective aspect. Immediately before the root there is a slot for reduplication, and then further ‘out’ the front you have the tense marker (the ε augment), while on the end slot you have “everything else”. If you’re reading Aubrey’s thesis with me, the table really makes this clear.

Anyway, what’s the upshot? Perfect marking goes next to the root, and in an aspect slot. You can’t mark perfect and also mark perfective or imperfective. You can mark perfect and then mark past time. So this supports both aspect prominence for Greek, and aspect for understanding the perfect.

Moving on to grammaticalisation, paradigmaticity, obligatoriness, and pervasiveness (remember those long words!), aspect is more pervasive (p84) because aspect is marked in both indicative and non-indicate forms; tense is only marked in the indicative.

The next step is to test the perfect with quantification. We talked about this back in my second post, and it’s around page 50 or so of the thesis. Basically, we want to see whether the perfect takes certain types of adverbs and not others. Cardinal counting (once, twice, thrice) should occur with perfectives, frequency counting (always, twice a day, five times a year, etc..) should occur with imperfectives. You probably need to read this section (p85-88) to get a full scope of it. Aubrey talks about how the different types of quantifier adverbs appear with different semantic types of perfects (resultatives, completives, anteriors), and talks about how ἀεὶ appears to function with perfects to indicate persistence rather than frequency. Anyway, the conclusion is that this test too confirms that the perfect should be understood primarily in aspectual terms.

The next metatest (p89-91) looks at discourse function, with a passage from Josephus. The conclusion is that the perfect do not provide mainline information that moves the narrative forward, which is what the perfective aspect does. It provides background information. This does not mean, as Campbell concluded, that the perfect is in fact imperfective though. “They both do convey temporal internal structure (Comrie 1976), but the type of temporal internal structure is distinct. The imperfective has no inherent endpoint, while the perfect at times places the focus on the completion of a backgrounded event and other times presents an event as a persistent state that existed concurrently with the foregrounded narrative” (p92).

The next section looks at gram-specific tests (anteriors, resultatives, and completives). In this post I round out the shorter section, looking at adverb tests, and leave the second half of chapter 4 for the next post. Specifically, we should expect adverbs such as “just” and “already” with anteriors, and “still” with resultatives. The conclusion is somewhat inconclusive, because the data splits. But what Aubrey does claim is that the Greek perfect allows for resultative-like grams. However the adverb test does not help us with completives, so the status of completives and anteriors requires further testing. Which we shall see in the second half of chapter 4.

What does the Patrologist do all day?

January 30, 2015 By thepatrologist in Uncategorized

The other day I was riding the bus to university and happened to be on the same bus as a fellow member of my church. They were expressing a typical sentiment about full-time research students: that they ought to be ‘incredibly disciplined’ since there are very few external constraitns on their time. This is, or ought to be, mostly true.

For myself, I aim to spend a full 5 days at my desk, minus an afternoon on which I do some Greek teaching. I get to the office 7:30 (if I drive) or 8:00 if I catch a bus, and leave between 5 and 6pm.

Generally speaking there are six things that fill each day. The first is primary, directly-related to writing the dissertation work. This includes sub-sections like reading secondary literature, working on my primary documents, and working on other ancient documents that are secondary to my thesis. Because this is the real work that is driving the thesis forward, I try and schedule blocks that total up to 4 hours a day for this work. Secondly, each day I spent a little bit of time (45mins usually) on some language work. Since I’m in an Australian context, I have no language exams, but I am supposed to be able to read and utilise secondary literature in relevant languages. For me that means German, French, and Italian. So most days I do a little bit of work on duolingo, and I am working faithfully through “German Quickly: A grammar for Reading German” by April Wilson, and “French for Reading” by Karl Sandberg. A third thing I do each week is spend some time more broadly on Greek and Latin, the two essential languages for my research. So I have about 4-6 hours spread across the week where I work on other texts, classical and patristic, that bear sometimes more sometimes less direct relationship to my field. Fourthly, I allot 30mins for lunch each day. Fifthly, I have about 3 skype calls each week, which involve some language tutoring that I do. They run for about 40 mins each. Sixthly, I do at least an hour’s worth of exercise each day, usually over at the university gym.

Once I slot in all those things, and the occasional trip to the library or the local shopping complex for various errands, and most of my day fills up with things to do. Let’s take a few example days:

Today (Friday): I got to the office at 7:30. Overnight I had posted a reddit comment about relationship of early Christianity and Judaism that received a lot of attention and comments, so I spent 25 minutes responding to comments from the previous evening. Then at 8 I settled into some language work, which meant about 45 mins of French/German/Italian. About 9 I switched to working directly on thesis work, which today meant re-reading portions of Basil’s Against Eunomius, writing commentary on it, and producing material that (eventually) will form a significant chapter. At 10:30 I took a short break from that to work on Augustine’s Confessions in Latin. Normally I have a skype call at 11, but today the other party cancelled so I had some time open up in my day. From 12 I had lunch, and then I returned to thesis work, this time reading some recent secondary sources that my thesis interacts with.

Normally I would go through until later in the afternoon, but today I went to the gym at 2pm, which wasn’t the best timing it turned out. At 3 I came back to the office and did some more reading and tidying up of a few loose ends, before heading home via the supermarket about 4. I then spent a couple of hours in the evening reading more on the Greek perfect and working on the Greek of Ad Ablabium.

So yes, grad student life for me is mainly about self-discipline and a lot of reading. So much reading. Always reading.

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (3)

January 27, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek Tags: Aspect, Aubrey, Greek, Linguistics, Perfect, RRG

Are you having fun yet? You can read parts 1 and 2 first.

Today we pick up at section 3.2.1, in which Aubrey talks about 2 approaches to categorising up how the perfect ‘fits in’ to languages. But I’m going to flip things up a bit by talking about the second approach (3.2.1.2) first. The second approach Aubrey discusses is by Bhat, who suggests an idealised model in which languages give more prominence to either aspect, tense, or mood. So imagine there are these 3 ‘ideal’ (almost Platonic) languages, one which privileges Aspect above all else, the other raises Tense to the same degree, the third treats Mood with this importance. Each actual language doesn’t match on of these ideals, but it will triangulate and lean towards one of these more than the others.

How do you know which element is more prominent? Features like: grammaticalisation (i.e. is the element embedded into the grammar of the language?), obligation (i.e. are speakers given no choice about whether to express the element or not. e.g. in some languages one must indicate whether something is perfective or imperfective in aspect, there is no non-aspect-marked form), systematic and pervasive (i.e. is the element featured throughout the language’s [verbal] system without significant gaps).

So a language that forces and features past vs. non-past may be tense prominent, a language that obliges perfective vs. imperfective is more likely to be aspect prominent, etc..

Aubrey discusses this model second for certain reasons, that Bhat manages to encapsulate ideas from Bybee-Dahl in a way useful for RRG. But in my view Bhat is a lot easier to understand than Bybee-Dhal and thus to explain. Bhat also (p59-60) suggests that some elements may be ‘re-explained’ within an language from one type of system to another. This can be seen in the Future. Is the future ‘tense’ modal (expressing ideas like desire, obligation, ability) or temporal in its operation? This differs from language to language, but it also differs diachronically, and this is certainly true for Ancient Greek. Some have analysed the future as deriving from a PIE desiderative suffix (p61), while offers argue that it derives from a perfective aspect suffix. So, the question then becomes, ‘Historically, did the future tense-form arise from a modal form or an aspect one?’ Regardless, with reference to Dionysius Thrax, Aubrey points out that Ancient Greek grammarians analysed it as aspectual.

Similarly with the perfect. For tense-prominent languages (still p61), perfects can be analysed temporally, a “past even that has current (present) relevance” (quoting Bhat). This certainly works quite well for English. On the other hand (p63) an aspect-prominent language has a perfect form that is aspectual, not temporal, in both its formation and its general significance.

Okay, now that we’ve got our heads around Bhat, let’s step back to 3.2.1.1, Bybee-Dahl. These two sideline categories like tense and aspect, and instead look at “grams”. What are “grams”? Imagine you just came up with a word that signified varies tense-forms or aspect-forms or mood-forms, but you wanted it not to mean any of them in particular, just all those varieties of putting a verb into a particular ‘form’. That’s a gram (I think!), or a “grammatical morpheme” – it’s a tag or structure that identifies a particular grammatical feature, but remember we’re dealing with verbal systems. So it’s when we analyse these grams that we go looking for their tense/aspect/mood in relation to their semantic content.

This frees us to look at grams more broadly, and consider how a range of notions: aspectual, temporal, modal, aktionsart-ish, and so on, can or could be realised in a language’s systems. There’s a great, difficult to summarise, illustrative diagram on p55.

One of the advantages of this model is that it sidesteps ‘beginning’ with the Perfect. instead, they present ‘gram-types’ such as “resultatives, completives, and anteriors” which have “similar paths of grammaticalization” that typically result in “perfect” forms. But it allows both synchronic and diachronic analysis of what that perfect means, its semiosis.

By dispensing with the tense-aspect-mood categories as a starting point, it allows a better approach to the individual systematisation of languages, however the disadvantages are a lack of engagement with some other linguistic theoretical elements (p57) such as that grammaticalisation of tense is usually distinct from grammaticalisation of aspect as a system. The failure is largely a result of tending to look at things from a more micro rather than macro perspective.

So Aubrey moves on in 3.2.2 to talk about how using these approaches, we must discuss mortphosyntactic and semantic tests (p64). How does the perfect line up with tense grams and aspect grams? How do we categorise actual grams in a particular language? We need some tests! Tests for grammatical prominence are something I talked a little bit earlier in this post: grammaticalisation, systematic organisation, obligatoriness, pervasiveness. The second step to is test for tense and aspect in particular. We must consider whether a particular gram functions within the paradigm of the tense system or aspect system, unambiguously or not. In some languages tense/aspect is always ambiguous, or better yet intertwined.

Aubrey talks through a number of other types of tests, which are summarised in a table on p70. Finally he talks about tests suitable for perfect-like grams (p71), which is the focus of the study. Bybee et alii set out two morphosyntactic tests for anterior and reultative grams: anteriors will take temporal adverbs likejust or already, but not still (prior state-of-affairs vs. persistent situation). Anterior grams are likely to be tense-oriented.

Resultative grams function in reverse: they should take still but not just and already, and resultatives are aspect-oriented. Sadly, Aubrey notes, Bybee et alii don’t have any more good tests for these 3 grams. Instead, some test need to be derived. Resultatives, by their semantic content, “require a normally telic verb”, so there’s a test waiting to happen. Completive grams tend to “correlate closely with change of state predicates”; these, and a few others, result in 7 tests (p74) for Aubrey to apply to perfect-like grams in Greek.

Great! In our next post we’ll get to work on understanding how Aubrey went with applying this to the Greek perfect

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (2)

January 24, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek Tags: Aspect, Aubrey, Greek, Linguistics, Perfect, RRG

For part 1 click here.

Today I’m going to talk my way through Chapter 3 of Aubrey’s thesis. What did Aubrey do in Chapter 2? He told you all about Role and Reference Grammar and then said, “hey, why doesn’t it do a good typology/classification of tense and aspect? Wouldn’t that be handy-dandy?” Chapter 3 sketches out what an approach to tense and aspect in RRG would/could/should look like.

Aubrey starts off by talking about some of the meta-issues; for example how categories relate to a particular language and to universal grammar, or at least a universalising concept of language (p29). Similarly, simply choosing what terminology to use, what distinctions or categories to draw up, is itself a step of interpretation, before we even get to the empirical questions (p30). There is, almost inevitably, a back and forth between the more theoretical and the more ‘on the ground’ levels of analysis here (p31). This issue of the “bidirectional relationship between” the two levels, quoting Bache, then gets applied to Porter’s analysis by way of critique. Porter introduces the label ‘remote’ to refere to the past/non-past distinction in Greek. But this choice of label, and especially how Porter uses it, do not match with more generalised applications of the term in linguistics. That is, remoteness is generally used to refer to temporal remoteness in languages, to temporal distance. But Porter repurposes the term to use it precisely for non-temporal remoteness that may be used temporally. This is idiosyncratic at best.

In the following section Aubrey considers a very interesting element of methodology. It has to do with example sentences, replacement, and minimal pairs. A typical way of teasing out linguistic differences is to use example sentences, and change a single element, to demonstrate the difference this makes in utterance. Drawing on Bache, Aubrey gives us a typology of 4 types: (I) Replacement is not possible due to a gap in the grammar, (II) replacement results in an ungrammatical sentence, (III) replacement results in a distinct change of meaning (non-synonymy), (IV) replacement involves slight to zero change of meaning (near synonymy). Aubrey runs through examples, with reference to English and to Koine, and demonstrates how all 4 categories need to be examined for linguistic typology, but also how the boundaries of these types are sometimes unclear. Further on (p.45f) he points out that generally Type II and III are the categories that best demonstrate claims about “morphological and syntactic forms”, but a responsible use of example sentences will be one that considers what type of contrast is in play, not merely what contrast is set up.

Careful attention to this typology of contrast sentences is important because misplaced emphasis on the wrong categories can lead to unjustifiable claims. This is seen in the Koine tense/aspect debates from the late 80s (p.47). Undue emphasis on type 4 contrasts supported claims that Greek was tenseless, whereas alternate understandings of the contrast pairs would support a different explanation that saw these as extensional differences. What’s the upshot at this point of Aubrey’s argument? That Porter argued for something on the basis of Type IV examples, when he should have given more argument on the basis of Types II and III, and that this undermines the strength of Porter’s analysis and conclusion.

Now Aubrey moves on (p.50) to a select examination of work on typology of tense and aspect. Here’s some real meat for you. First up, Comrie’s “definition of aspect as involving the grammaticalization of the ‘internal temporal constituency,’ of a situation” (p.51), then Bhat’s 3 classes: (1) perfective vs. imperfective, (2) phasal (distinctions of temporal constituency: e.g. ingressive, resultative, progressive, etc., (3) quantificational (distinctions of countability).

Almost everyone who has heard about aspect in Greek is familiar with the first distinction here. The second is a set of terms that many will be familiar with, and generally in Greek assign as ‘usages’, or ‘senses’ of particular verbs in context (so-called “ingressive imperfect” for instance). The third similarly so, “habitual present”, “iterative imperfect”). This has really just been a way for typological Intermediate grammars to explain/classify usages of Greek tense-forms that don’t match grammar-translationists default glosses.

This 3rd category of Bhat’s is also “difficult…in descriptive practice”. Languages just don’t neatly have/define/contrast their aspectual markings along lines that one would like.

When it comes to tense, things are more simply (p53), I mean you can only really have three deictic tense references: past, present, future, in relation to the point of speech. Any variation on this is only going to do one of two things: mark degrees of temporal remoteness from the point of speech, or using non-deictic reference, e.g. indicating past/present/future from a different point of time. Of course, one can combing deictic and non-deictic reference systems, to indicate combinations of temporal reference in relation to both time of speech, time of event, time of relative event, etc..

I’m going to stop here for today. In the next half of chapter 3 Aubrey goes on to talk about typology and the Perfect more specifically.

Reading Aubrey’s Thesis (1)

January 19, 2015 By thepatrologist in Greek Tags: Aspect, Aubrey, Greek, Linguistics, Perfect, RRG

I’ve started reading Mike Aubrey’s masters thesis, which I suggest you do too. To get the statement of bias out of the way, I have vague sympathetic feelings towards Aubrey based entirely on internet interactions, and recommend his updated-just-enough-to-keep-you-subscribed blog. Apart from that I have no vested interest in talking him up.

Why should you read his masters thesis? 1. It’s about Greek. 2. It applies linguistics, not just grrrammmar (I didn’t mean to write it like that, but my keyboard spat it out thus and I thought it worth keeping!), 3. It’s about the perfect, kind of. And everyone loves to talk about the perfect these days. 4. If nothing else, by the end of it you will have absorbed so much technical jargon that you will be able to bamboozle your interlocutors into silence on any topic, especially unrelated ones.

You should know, too, that I am not formally trained in linguistics. Studying 5.5 languages and having a perverse interest in the field turned me into a paralinguist, and leeching off my wife’s textbooks while she did an MA in applied linguistics have given me all the hubris of someone who thinks they know linguistics but probably would fail the intro course.

What’s Aubrey’s thesis doing? You can understand it as basically testing two things going in different directions: on the one hand, it’s testing some of the limits of Role and Reference Grammar on its ability to deal with “detailed semantics of distinctions” (p2, quoting Butler 2003), especially related to temporality and aspectuality (tense and aspect). So it’s a thesis putting RRG to the test. How? by applying RRG to the Greek perfect. In the other direction, it’s testing a hypothesis about the Greek perfect, so the outcome ought to be a better notion of RRG in the area of semantic distinction, and conversely a better understanding of the Greek perfect. Great!

In chapter 2 of his thesis, Aubrey sets to work to talk about what RRG is and what it does. RRG breaks things down around 2 ‘representations’, Syntactic and Semantic. What I’m going to do is try and give you a dummies guide to Aubrey’s thesis. So, syntactic has to do with how you arrange the relationships between words (and word-y things, linguistic units, but let’s just stick with words in this version), and semantics has to do with meaning. Good? Great. RRG has a bunch of neat ways of talking about different states, events, and processes, and a few ways to carve up the space of syntax.

RRG is basically realist about language. Language talks about stuff. To do that you must have ‘predication’ and you must have ‘reference’. I.e, you must talk about something (a referent), and you must say something about it (predication). Language is a tool to achieve communication: to say Xs about Ys.

So onwards, RRG treats semantics as the basis for syntax. How one talks about the structure of language utterances is determined by the ‘what’, the meaning, of that utterance. This is why the predicate is the syntactic nucleus. It’s the heart of the heart of what’s going on in a clause! Then you add in an argument or two, and voila! it’s a core. What’s an argument? it’s an X or a Y you substitute into sentence to make it work. e.g. John eats violins. ‘John’ is an argument. ‘violins’ is an argument. They are variables that we use with a nucleus, with a predicate, with ‘eats’, to make a core.

I’m going to skip some stuff about operators. Let’s go to 2.1.2 Semantic representation. In this section RRG breaks down “what verbs do” into different classes. Aubrey presents 6

States
Achievements
Accomplishments
Activities
Semelfactives
Active-achievements

A state just describes what is. “I am dead”. There is nothing dynamic about a state. It doesn’t have to be an unchanging state. “I am hungry” is a state, but not an eternal one. All the rest are dynamic, they involve action, movement, change. Achievements and accomplishments sound like they are the same thing, but they’re not. “The window shattered” is an achievement: something happened and a new state was achieved, but the action was ‘all at once’, or ‘punctual’. “The window froze” is an accomplishment: it didn’t all at once freeze, it underwent a process of getting colder until it reached a state of being frozen. Activities are dynamic, but they don’t necessarily have an end point. “I swam” describes an activity.

The last two are expansions, as you can see from semel-factive’s breakdown, it is an achievement that is simultaneous but doesn’t involve a change of state. Whereas an active achievement takes an Activity and adds an endpoint. “I swam to work” for example.

There’s a really great table at 2.4 which shows how all these 6 classes are divided up by whether they are +/i Static, Dynamic, Telic, Punctual. Telic, if it’s unclear, is whether it has an end point.

Not only this, but just after 2.5, Aubrey fills you in on various ways to ‘test’ to see whether a predicate can be classified into each of the 6 categories.

What does all this have to do with Aspect? Good thing we’re reading a thesis on it. In section 2.2 Aubrey notes that there is a pretty big ‘gap’ between RRG’s description of different types of predicates, and the question of aspect. It’s the problem that Aspect really lies in the realm of operators, things that ‘do stuff’, neat stuff like, ‘mark and show you the aspect of the verb’.

When you come to tense and aspect, these are part of “the difficult issues of peripheral and complex grammatical categories”. So what’s a poor Greek linguist to do? Aubrey says, that what RRG needs is some better categorisation and tools for classifying what’s going on with tense and aspect. And that’s chapter 3.

The Patrologist

Seumas Macdonald

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