Linguistics (cont.)
- Word order in Latin and Greek is often described as free, but it is not random. Word order is what gets you from disjoint sentences to coherent and incrementally interpretable text. Reading a paragraph of Latin or Greek without attention to word order is like taking a black and white photograph; adding in the word order is like going from black and white to full colour. A whole new dimension of meaning is opened up. How can we reduce the prima facie aimless variation of Latin and Greek word order to a principled and coherent system that interfaces syntactic (and/or prosodic) structure with the pragmatic and semantic meanings that it encodes?
Evidently, Classical linguists are not limited to working on narrow and specialized problems; there are plenty of quite basic problems of general interest and significance for the discipline. However a successful outcome does require some degree of technical expertise; it also requires us to cross traditional academic demarcations, combining rich philological documentation with both formalist and functionalist approaches to linguistic analysis.
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