Description

• Title:
  Functional Interpretation of Ancient Texts. Two Types of Greek Prolepsis in Medea by Euripides (248–249) and in the Gospel of St. John (12, 12–13)
• Creator:
  Sobotka, Piotr
• Description:
  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 description 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 last two types are discussed using examples from Medea by Euripides 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.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights:
  Prawa autorskie (c) 2015 Linguistica Copernicana
• Date:
  2012.01.07
• Type:
  info:eu-repo/semantics/article;
  info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
• Language:
  Polish
• Source:
  Linguistica Copernicana; Tom 7 Nr 1 (2012); 53-86;
  2391-7768;
  2080-1068
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu
• Relation: https://apcz.umk.pl/LinCop/article/view/LinCop.2012.020/6623
• Subject:
  analiza funkcjonalna;
  temat;
  remat;
  szyk;
  greka;
  łacina;
  partykuła;
  koniunktyw;
  gár;
  dé;
  prolepsis;
  Medea;
  Ewangelia wg św. Jana;
  báion ‘gałąź palmowa’;
  foĩniks I ‘palma;
  gałąź palmowa’;
  foĩniks II ‘feniks’
• Identifier: https://apcz.umk.pl/LinCop/article/view/LinCop.2012.020
• Data provider:
  Akademicka Platforma Czasopism
• Can I use it?:
  seek permission
• Type:
  text