The Mental Equation Factor in ‘Aberrant’ Syntax of Greek and Latin

Extract

‘Wir wollen ja mehr oder anderes als die Thatsachen classificieren; wir wollen sie erklären’ is the cry of a neglected linguist of the last century which it would not be idle to echo today, especially in the matter of syntactical oddities in the Greek and Latin authors. The immensely valuable work of those who have collected and classified instances of ‘aberrant’ syntax in the classical languages has the inherent disadvantage that lists and categories are made up according to the resultant form of the aberration rather than the underlying mental process which can itself often be analysed with profit. The result is a division of the phenomena into anacoluthon, contamination, pleonasm, ellipse, constructio ad sensum, and so on, a convenient but somewhat barren method, lessening the possibility of explaining and illuminating one example from another. Indeed to do thus cuts across the scientific method, putting together forms or uses which result from different thought- or speech-habits and separating many which owe their origin to identical or similar tendencies but have moved on somewhat divergent paths. Löfstedt, though he deals with the oddities of usage under conventional headings, pays no little regard to the psychological aspect and admits that a clear-cut division into conventional classes is not always free from considerable difficulty and is not particularly important for the scholar who would explain these things on a psychological basis.* Contamination in particular has been used rather to excess. The much quoted English oddity ‘I am friends with him’ is consistently stated to be a contamination of ‘I am friendly with him’ and ‘we are friendsür Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1860, 1.97.