Methodology
How does one go about discovering the grammatical
categories for a language that no one speaks any more. Of course people
do speak Greek today, but they speak a form of the language which is different
in some important respects from the language represtented in the ancient
documents. So how does one go about testing hypotheses about the way the
language functioned in, say, the middle of the first century of the common
era when it is impossible to interview native speakers to ask if your judgments
are right? Reading this chapter will help you understand the importance
of these questions and the limitaions that linguists face in answering
them. It will also help you see that very much can be established
with confidence despite the lack of native speaker informants.
This chapter will help you understand the
methods that linguists use. In the process it will prepare you for the
next two chapters, where I first examine the empirical evidence which supports
the judgments already made in the traditional grammars about word-level
categories, and in later work about phrase-level categories, then propose
that still others are needed.
At the time of publication this chapter filled a
significant gap in the literature on Hellenistic Greek by addressing in
a straight forward fashion the limitations that face the application of
modern linguistics to ancient Greek. I have treated that issue more fully
since in "How do we know a phrase is a phrase?" (In Biblical Greek Language
and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research).