Steve, a beauty for you. A Q about grounding. In the Greek Verb Revisited, your note [77] (p.261) regarding theme-line events in post-nuclear subordinate clauses for foregrounding w.r.t. main clauses does not appear to hold in Greek; & though he [Levinsohn] affirms the principle, he offers no ex's from Greek (p.262). I listened to the ETS tape where you mentioned disagreement with Levinsohn over this, & seemed to suggest that he came around to your way of seeing this. He further mentions (with ex’s) postnuclear GA (p.172) and ωστε (p.175), but your counterclaim would preclude those. However, one anomalous scenario sticks out in the literature where the discussion seems to draw a heads-up is over Continuative Relative Clauses. Isn’t it precisely the claim you are hesitant about that underlines CRC as a discourse device? Example: 1 Thess 5.24 πιστος ὁ καλων ὑμαι ὃς και ποιησει                       The one calling you is faithful who indeed will do it The info in such a relative clause is usually more important than that of the initial clause thereby giving more grounding to drive the plot line forward. So “characteristically, the info preceding the RC is backgrounded in relation to what follows” (p.177), the RC becoming the foreground. Are CRCs exempt because they are NOT subordinate adverbial clauses? At NARR 10.3.4 it mentions “such a construction is to treat the info conveyed in the preceding clause as the GROUND for the info conveyed by the RC” (2000:191ff), & “the final proposition is the one to which the sentence has been building”. Is this somehow saying the main clause is still the event foregrounding the narrative theme-line, but the subsequent RC has a still higher grounding or (maybe) is only highlighted (rather than THE foregrounded one for the plot-line) or only a relative grounding to the nuclear clause (confined to the sentence complex)? Am I missing something in the confusion? Or is this something still open for continuing study (instead of continuous rel. clauses) (p.269)? Maybe too hard a nut to crack too decisively!

  1. Hi Reg, That's a great example from 1 Thess! My disagreement with Levinsohn was not that it NEVER happened, but that it is not the natural place for it to occur. His claim was that dependent clauses could be used to foreground information, not just contain foreground information. We left things at the "may be found there" but without any additional claims about it intentionally foregrounding it. Your example illustrates well how that extra bit of information is pivotal, but my point was that such instances are a rarity.   Levinsohn's analysis does not treat it as a CRC, so I will add this to the typo list for the LGDNT dataset. I did address his CRC examples from DFGNT from Acts in a footnote of my article, noting that they are all embedded theme lines. They introduce backstories that make it seem as though this is the new direction of the theme line, but instead they will end and the higher level theme line will be resumed. Using a dependent form like a relative clause instructs the reader NOT to take this as advancing the same theme, but rather a dependent/embedded one. So while SHL is correct that the info in the relative clause is clearly more salient than the one on which it depends, we need to look at the larger discourse picture of the embedded theme line. The former is simply an artifact of the latter.  Hope that makes some sense, thanks for posting the example!