Jared S. Klein

Indefinite Pronouns, Polarity, and Related Phenomena in Classical Armenian: A Study Based on the Old Armenian Gospels

Classical Armenian possesses two series of indefinite pronouns, one in -k‘, the other in -mn. The first is employed for the most part in contexts where English any appears, the second where English employs some. The distinction is therefore essentially one of polarity sensitivity, the forms in -k‘ being negative-polarity items (NPIs), those in -mn positive-polarity items (PPIs). As in English, the NPIs are employed also as generalizing or free-choice indefinites; but a host of other features, including minimal-value quantification, scalarity, and despecification are involved as well in the Classical Armenian -k‘-forms.

Reviews : English Vocabulary Elements. By Keith Denning and William R. Leben. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. xii + 255:

Intended for self-study or use in courses at the advanced high school and college levels, this book aims to provide skills in vocabulary analysis for students preparing for various standardized exams, foreign students of English, and those considering majors in a variety of academic disciplines, both scientific and humanistic. The authors limit their discussion to English derivatives from Greek and Latin, which is unfortunate, because there is a richness in the Germanic morphology of English which ought to be tapped in a course of this sort, if only in a single chapter. Space for such a discussion could easily be found by deleting the chapter on usage and variation, which seems strangely out of place in the context of the material which surrounds it. The treatment of the Greek and Latin component of English is good but

Historical linguistics and Biblical Hebrew : an Indo-Europeanist’s view

Rezetko and Young’s Historical linguistics and Biblical Hebrew: steps toward an integrated approach brings variation analysis to bear on the question of the periodisation of Biblical Hebrew. However, this methodology is at best microdiachronic, dealing with variation in synchronic terms. In order to answer the question they pose, a language with a history as long as Biblical Hebrew requires macrodiachronic techniques which look at real linguistic processes. Several such processes are discussed in this paper, and though they collectively converge in pointing to a late date for Qoheleth, they are insufficient to establish a linguistically-based entity “Late Biblical Hebrew”. At the present time, one can at best apply this term in a non-linguistic sense to the Hebrew of those books known on extra-linguistic grounds to have been chronologically late.

Book Review: English Words. History and Structure

A course in the history and structure of the English vocabulary, often entitled “English Derivatives from Greek and Latin,” is a staple of many Classics departments, where it is frequently taught indifferently by faculty who would much rather be teaching literature or language courses. However, when taught properly at the advanced undergraduate level or (with the appropriate degree of sophistication) even to graduate students, such a course can be a highly satisfying experience, both for the instructor and for the students. In my view, the proper person to teach such a course is a linguistically inclined classicist who has a vivid interest in the English language. The beauty of the course is the way in which it brings together students of both English and Classics (as well as other disciplines) and integrates their interests in an almost magically transforming way, creating a realm of knowledge a priori unimaginable to its participating constituencies. During the past nine years two books have appeared, published by major academic presses, which are intended as textbooks for such a course: Keith Denning and William R. Leben’s (1995) English Vocabulary Elements and now the present book. Having read and reviewed the former for this journal (Klein 1998), I find it difficult to discuss the latter in a completely independent, noninvidious way. In the following remarks I will therefore have occasion to refer also to the earlier book for comparative purposes. Stockwell (S) and Minkova’s (M) book is in general very much like that of Denning (D) and Leben (L). The major difference in content is that, whereas the latter includes a chapter on usage and variation, the book under review contains a final chapter (chapter 10) on the pronunciation of classical words in English as well as an appendix (Appendix I) on dictionaries. As for their approaches to the English vocabulary as a whole, the present book is intended to be more diachronic than D and L by virtue of providing source forms in its morpheme list (Appendix II), whereas D and L present only a source language (G[reek], L[atin], or both). On the other

Responsion in the Rigveda

One of the most pervasive stylistic features of the Rigveda is repetition at all levels of linguistic structure: phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic. Of these, the most abstract is syntactic pattern repetition, known in classical rhetorical theory as responsion. This paper surveys the different types of responsion occurring in the Rigveda, organizing them by the number of words and cola (the repeated word-group structures) which they contain. The results of this inquiry show that the bards were capable of constructing elegant poetry out of antithetical, analogical, and tautological thought patterns completely adapted to the metrical vehicle which so distinctively characterizes the Rigvedic corpus.

The Diachronic Syntax of the Particle u in the Rigveda

The exact meaning and syntactic function of the particle u in the Rigveda has always presented difficulties. In this article it is argued that the various employments of u in the Rigveda can be reduced to two basic functions: a coreferential function and a conjunctive function. The historical connection between these two values is subsequently traced, and it is shown that the conjunctive value of u is the result of a straightforward reinterpretation of the coreferential value in sequences involving repeated instances of the sd/ldpronoun.