19 International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics ...

G E N E R A L S E S S I O N
“Sketch Engine” and the “Hellenic National Corpus” are used for English and Modern Greek
respectively. Parts of the database entries will be selected to exemplify the templates and briefly
present (a) the motivated and systematic treatment of polysemy and phraseology, and (b) the unified
way of comparing and contrasting distributions of semantic concepts among different lexical units.
The implication of the study is that the constructed databases and their methodological design can
serve as a model for the development of an extended bilingual lexical resource for the language pair
English – Greek to be used (and re-used) by lexicographers writing various types of dictionaries.
References
Atkins, B. T. S. 2002. Bilingual dictionaries: Present, past and future. In M.-H. Corréard (ed.), Lexicography and
Natural Language Processing. A Festschrift in Honour of B. S. T. Atkins. Euralex 2002, 1-28.
Atkins, B. T. S. & Rundell, M. 2008. The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
British National Corpus (BNC). 2008. (last access: 29-10-2008)
Fillmore, Ch. <strong>19</strong>85. Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica 6.2: 222-254.
Fillmore, Ch. & Atkins, B. T. S. <strong>19</strong>92. Toward a frame-based lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In
A. Lehrer & E. F. Kittay (eds.), Frames, Fields, and Contrasts. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 75-102.
Firth, J. R. <strong>19</strong>57. Papers in Linguistics <strong>19</strong>34-<strong>19</strong>51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hellenic National Corpus (HNC). 2008. (last access: 29-10-2008)
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. <strong>19</strong>80. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Sinclair, J. <strong>19</strong>91. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, J. 2003. Reading Concordances. An Introduction. London: Pearson Education Limited.
Pragmatic factors that determine main clause constituent order variation in Greek
Efrosini Deligianni
University of Lancaster
e.deligianni@lancaster.ac.uk, efrodelig@yahoo.co.uk
A recurring commonplace in descriptions of Greek word order is that all six logically possible
permutations of the major clausal constituents [S V O] yield grammatical linearization patterns. This
general observation seems to hold true for all historical stages of the language.
Nonetheless, there are two major arguments that point towards word order reorganization in Greek.
First, Taylor (<strong>19</strong>94), Horrocks (<strong>19</strong>97: 59-60) and Atchison (2001: 162-64 & <strong>19</strong>5-96) among others
have put forth the claim that word order change of the OV→VO type is attested in the history of Greek,
which moves toward completion in the Hellenistic era. Furthermore, Dover (<strong>19</strong>60:10ft, 68) arrived at
the conclusion, although tentative, that syntactic determinants of word order have emerged in
Hellenistic Greek, which were irrelevant in Ancient Greek (AG). Second, the preponderance of SVO in
main declarative clauses is uniformly agreed by all researchers in the field. Most importantly,
Georgakopoulos et al. (2006), in collaboration with the research project D2 on Typology of Information
Structure set out to empirically assess the claim that “…contemporary Modern Greek (MG) shifts
towards a language type with rigid SVO word order, allowing for alternative word orders only to
express topicalization or focus on a constituent”. Based on the above, this study asserts that there is a
move towards syntacticization in MG. This can be empirically verified if an unmarked word order can
be clearly identified, which is used in a variety of pragmatic contexts. Concurrently, all the alternative
orderings are reserved for specialized pragmatic functions.
Greek is specially well-suited for diachronic study, due its long written history (8 th c. AD. onwards).
It is this continuous attestation which has rendered possible the compilation of a broadly
representative corpus of historical narrative texts. It is comprised of text extracts of 300 clauses from
five representative texts per historical period. Data analysis is placed within Knud Lambrecht’s
information structure (IS) theoretical framework (<strong>19</strong>86, <strong>19</strong>87, <strong>19</strong>94, 2000), as it is the most elaborate
one to date. Lambrecht’s analysis generates a taxonomy of declarative IS types. Their
interrelationships have also been laid out explicitly by means of a circular representation in conceptual
space. The interaction of three interrelated parameters was investigated: functional structure, which
describes the actual order of elements in the clause (i.e. S-V-O), syntactic structure, and information
structure.
The research hypothesis has been fully substantiated by data analysis. In AG, on the one hand, it
is not possible to identify a single word order pattern as the unmarked one. SV(O) is restricted to
shifted topic-comment clauses, a topic-comment subcategory. Besides, there is no direct mapping
between syntactic constructions and pragmatic contexts. In MG, on the other hand, SV(O) has been
‘promoted’ to the status of the unmarked word order type. This is typically linked to topic-comment
<strong>19</strong> th ISTAL 11