Funkcjonalna interpretacja tekstów historycznych. Dwa typy tekstów prolepsy w języku greckim na przykładzie Medei Eurypidesa (248-249) i Ewangelii wg św. Jana (12, 12-13)

• Authors: Sobotka Piotr

Title variants

EN

Functional Interpretation of Ancient Texts. Two Types of Greek Prolepsis in Medea by Eurypides (248-249) and in the Gospel of St. John (12, 12-13)

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The two parts of the article analyse the possibilities of a functional interpretation, in terms of the theme-rheme devision, of ancient texts. The author discusses examples from Classical Greek and Latin as well as New Testament Greek, especially their word order, grammatical and lexical features. On this basis he proposes an analytical approach to the description of the linguistic values connected on some degree with the communicative structure of these examples. The contextual procedures of indicating markers of thematic or rhematic elements of the sentences in question should be compared with conclusions drawing on the grammatical and semantic observations on the sentence constituents. The determination of theme and rheme exponents must be made - depending on the language - by verifying the means of coding information structure, relevant to the given language, text type, and time of its composition. A complete description of these means should be proceeded by detailed investigation of, for example, in the case of Ancient Greek: standard and contrastive word order, initial positions of utterances (including semantic descriptions of items involved in these positions), functions of the particles, conjunctions, articles, adverbs, personal pronouns, anaphors et al., syntactic and semantic roles of the constituents, etc. The second part of this article considers information status and value of Greek prolepsis. The author distinguishes morphological, syntactic and lexical prolepsis. The las two types are discussed using examples from Medea by Eurypides and the Gospel of St. John. The first example represents syntactic prolepsis, the second one - lexical. Neither the pronoun ἡμᾶς 'we' from Medea, nor the noun φοινίκων 'palm branches' from St. John's Gospel are thematic as claimed by some researches. Both syntactic and lexical prolepsis are components of a different level of utterances than the material one. The author postulates to consider them as rhematic rather than thematic. Prolepsis functions like quotation which comments on the whole utterance.

Keywords

EN

functional analysis; theme; rheme; word order; Greek; Latin; particle; conjunction; gár; dé; prolepsis; Medea; the Gospel of St. John; báion ‘palm branch’; foĩniks I ‘palm tree, palm branch’; foĩniks II ‘phoenix’

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu. Wydawnictwo UMK
• Journal: Linguistica Copernicana
• Year: 2012
• Issue: 1(7)
• Pages: 53-85

Contributors

author

Sobotka Piotr

• Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, Instytut Języka Polskiego