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Title:
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Semiosis as the Sixth Sense: Theorising the unperceived in ancient Greek
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Author:
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Astika Kappagoda
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Macquarie University
, Postgraduate Studies in Applied Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2004
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Historical Linguistics
Linguistic Theories
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Subject Language(s):
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Greek, Ancient
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Director(s):
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David Butt
Christian Matthiessen
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Abstract:
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It is assumed that Western intellectual thinking and writing originates in the cultural practices of ancient Greece. In particular, the activity of constructing theories has its first identifiable origins during the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE in the Greek world. This thesis aims to investigate what linguistic resources had been developed in ancient Greek to enable this form of cultural activity, since the language of these texts constructs such theories.
It is argued in this thesis that such linguistic resources had been present in Homeric Greek. However, as the Greek world changed over the next four centuries, these resources were recombined and further developed– in particular, the simultaneous deployment of persuasion with description or narrative– to result in the construction of theories, as in Herodotus' explanation of the flooding of the Nile. Furthermore, this theorising activity comes to have an influence on the activity of describing or narrating events, so that such descriptions are modelled in terms of a covert theoretical model, in order to construct understanding and conscious knowledge. The historian Thucydides' account of the plague of Athens demonstrates such a theorised description. Thus the meaning-making of texts becomes a legitimate 'mental tool' for investigating and understanding one's experience of the world.
A multi-stratal and multi-levelled linguistic analysis using the theoretical framework of systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) was performed in order to trace the diachronic development of theorisation. This development is characterised in terms of an ensemble of features of generic structure, rhetorical structure, and ideational lexicogrammar (and its relationship to clausal semantics through metaphor). Since there is no existing SFL description of ancient Greek, a major part of this thesis also investigates how SFL theory might be applied to this language, in order to support the linguistic analysis and enable textual intepretation.
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