Helma Dik Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue

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Barry Hofstetter
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Helma Dik Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

Any thoughts on this, or anything to add to the Bryn Mawr review? It's on sale both Kindle and hard copy "insanely cheap" on Amazon.

https://tinyurl.com/yxfouh6t

The Bryn Mawr Review:

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008-06-08.html
N.E. Barry Hofstetter

Cuncta mortalia incerta...

cb
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Re: Helma Dik Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue

Post by cb »

Hi, this is an excellent book. You will find it very useful if you accept that pragmatics can give a meaningful account of word order. If however you worry that pragmatics can be partially circular (it explains constituent order in clauses by reference to pragmatics, but interprets pragmatics partially by reference to constituent order in clauses: to be fair, also by reference to surrounding context), you will maintain your worry throughout the book. Dik addresses this circularity concern in sec. 2.5.4 in a single paragraph (I had wished she would go into a little more detail when I read this book years ago). I always wondered when reading the book: 'if the constituent order in this verse was actually the reverse in the extant texts, could an equally convincing explanation of the pragmatics be given?'.

No matter what your position on this, if your aim is to deepen your understanding of tragic iambics, it’s definitely worth reading and engaging with the interpretations. If however you want this to practice iambic composition, I don’t think it will help that much: Dik makes clear that the pragmatic model cannot predict constituent order, but only explain texts we have.

For the purpose of iambic tri composition, I used instead Dik’s 1998 paper ‘Words into verse: the localisation of some metrical word-types in the iambic trimeter of Sophocles’, from which I created tables in a set of iambic tri notes, which used to be at the link in the post below from over a decade ago, but now seem to have disappeared off the internet (no great loss…)
viewtopic.php?t=5520

Cheers, Chad

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