scholarly journals What’s in the Middle?

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-23
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Horrocks
Keyword(s):  
Language Learners ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Sensu Stricto ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Morphological Form ◽  
Middle Voice ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Self Interest

It has long been taken for granted in reference works, grammars and elementary introductions that Ancient Greek had three grammatical voices, active, passive and middle. Yet scholars have always had great difficulty in characterising the middle voice in a straightforward and convincing way, and language learners are often perplexed to find that most of the middles they find in texts fail to exemplify the function, usually involving some notion of self interest, that is typically ascribed to this voice. This article therefore re-examines the Ancient Greek middle, both through the lens of a general survey of “middle voice” functions across languages, and through the analysis of all the medio-passive verb forms attested in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic.  The principal observations are that Ancient Greek middles do not represent a regular pattern of usage either from a typological point of view or as employed specifically in Republic 1 (the database is in fact partly extended to other works). Accordingly, the main conclusion is that the Ancient Greek middle is not a grammatical voice sensu stricto, i.e. a regular syntactic alternation applying to all verbs with a given set of properties and expressed by a regular morphological form with a predictable semantic function. Rather, it appears to be a convenient collective name for a large set of “autonomous” verb forms that are either clearly deponent (i.e., have no active counterparts) or that have been lexicalised in a specialised meaning vis-à-vis their supposed active counterparts (i.e., are also deponents in practice, despite appearances). In all probability, therefore, medio-passive morphology, whatever it once represented in terms of function, was recharacterised prehistorically as “passive” morphology, leaving a residue of verbs exhibiting forms with non-passive functions. Presumably, these survived as “middles” only because they had no active counterparts or had been assigned innovative meanings that distinguished them from any formally related actives.

FORGOTTEN UNITY OF BODY AND SOUL AND THE NEED FOR A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF SPORT

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 2523-2529
Author(s):  
Slobodan Marković ◽  
Zoran Momčilović ◽  
Vladimir Momčilović
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Constructive Dialogue ◽  
Ancient Greek Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Sport ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Present Text

This text is an attempt to see sport in different ways in the light of ancient philosophical themes. Philosophy of sports gets less attention than other areas of the discipline that examine the other major components of contemporary society: philosophy of religion, political philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of science. Talking about sports is often cheap, but it does not have to be that way. One of the reasons for this is insufficiently paid attention to the relation between sport and philosophy in Greek. That is it's important to talk about sports, just as important as we are talking about religion, politics, art and science. The argument of the present text is that we can try to get a handle philosophically on sports by examining it in light of several key idea from ancient Greek philosophy. The ancient Greeks, tended to be hylomorphists who gloried in both physical and mental achievement. Тhe key concepts from Greek philosophy that will provide the support to the present text are the following: arete, sophrosyne, dynamis and kalokagathia. These ideals never were parts of a realized utopia in the ancient world, but rather provided a horizon of meaning. We will claim that these ideals still provide worthy standards that can facilitate in us a better understanding of what sports is and what it could be. How can a constructive dialogue be developed which would discuss differences in understanding of sport in Ancient Greece and today? In this paper, the authors will try to answer this question from a historical and philosophical point of view. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section of the paper presents two principally different forms or models of focus in sport competitions – focus on physical excellence or focus on game. The dialectic discourse regarding these two approaches to physical activity is even more interesting due to the fact that these two models take precedence over one another depending on context. In the second section of the paper, the focus shifts to theendemic phenomenon of the Ancient Greek Olympic Games, where the topic is discussed from the perspective of philosophy with frequent historical reflections on the necessary specifics, which observeman as a physical-psychological-social-spiritual being. In the third section of this paper, the authors choose to use the thoughts and sayings of the great philosopher Plato to indicate how much this philosopher wasactually interested in the relationship between soul and body, mostly through physical exercise and sport, because it seems that philosophers who came after him have not seriously dealt with this topic in Plato’s way, although they could.

Imperatives, V-movement and logical mood

1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Luisa Rivero ◽  
Arhonto Terzi
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Distinctive Morphology

Imperative Vs with distinctive morphology either have a distinctive syntax (Modern Greek, Spanish), or distribute like others Vs (Serbo-Croatian, Ancient Greek). The contrast follows from properties of the root C. The first type has a strong Imperative V-feature in C, and under Chomsky's Greed Principle, Imperative Vs raise overtly to check this feature. The second type is the Wackernagel language, whose C hosts no features, but V-features are in I. If no phrase fronts, Vs move to C to support second position items. V-to-C affects all Vs, is last resort, follows Lasnik's Enlightened Self-Interest, and escapes Greed.

The L2 syllabus: corpus or contrivance?

Corpora ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Shortall
Keyword(s):  
Natural Frequency ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Frequency Data ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Real Language ◽  
Corpus Data

Corpus linguists have argued that corpora allow us to present lexical and grammatical patterns to language learners as they occur in real language, thereby exposing the learner to authentic target language (Mindt, 1996; Biber et al., 2002; Sinclair, 2004). And there is now a growing body of empirical research into how corpus studies can benefit ELT materials design and development (Ljung, 1990, 1991; Römer, 2004, 2005). This study investigates how the present perfect is represented in a spoken corpus and in ELT textbooks. The objective is to see whether corpus frequency data can make textbook present perfect presentation represent reality more accurately, and also whether there are sometimes pedagogic aims that may override frequency considerations. Results show that textbooks fail to represent adequately how present perfect interacts with other verb forms to create hybrid tenses such the present perfect passive. Textbooks also over-represent the frequency of structures such as the present perfect continuous. Adverbs such as yet and already are much more frequent in textbooks than in the corpus. Textbook writers seem to deliberately exaggerate the frequency of such adverbs, and arguably use them as tense markers or flagging devices so that learners will expect to see present perfect when they see yet and already. This suggests that disregard for natural frequency data may be justifiable if pedagogic considerations of this kind are taken into account. So, while corpus data provides important and useful frequency data for the teaching of grammar, pedagogic objectives may sometimes require that frequency data is disregarded.

scholarly journals Phraseographie

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (36) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Erla Hallsteinsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Methodological Basis ◽  
Multiword Expressions ◽  
Interesting Part ◽  
Corpus Data

Multiword expressions – i.e. phraseological units – like idioms and collocations are one of the most interesting part of every language. In this article, I investigate phraseological units from a lexicographical point of view. I discuss the theoretical and methodological basis of phraseography as a discipline that includes aspects of lexicography, phraseology, corpus linguistics and theories of language learning. I demonstrate the importance of corpora as a source for the lexicographer and the use of corpus data. I also discuss the requirements for the lexicographical treatment of phraseological units by the compilation of a phraseological database for language learners in relation to their assumed needs that have already been described in detail.

Voluntarism, Naturalism, and Moral Realism

2020 ◽  
pp. 130-140
Author(s):  
Terence Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Moral Rightness ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Vicious Regress ◽  
Divine Commands

Pufendorf criticizes Hobbes from a voluntarist point of view. He argues that if there were no divine commands, Hobbes would be right to derive morality from self-interest. Divine commands introduce the element of morality that goes beyond self-interest. Suarez is wrong, therefore, to believe in objective morality without divine commands. Shaftesbury attacks both egoists and voluntarists as ‘nominal moralists’ who overlook the objective reality of moral rightness and wrongness. Cudworth defends this position, arguing that any attempt to derive genuine morality from commands leads to a vicious regress. Clarke argues, from a position similar to Cudworth’s, that Hobbes cannot consistently maintain his view that nothing is morally right or wrong without enforcement by an organized state.

The Periodic System

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Scerri
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Platonic Solid ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Platonic Solids ◽  
System P ◽  
Chemical Inertness ◽  
Dimensional Shape ◽  
The Many

In ancient Greek times, philosophers recognized just four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—all of which survive in the astrological classification of the 12 signs of the zodiac. At least some of these philosophers believed that these different elements consisted of microscopic components with differing shapes and that this explained the various properties of the elements. These shapes or structures were believed to be in the form of Platonic solids (figure 1.1) made up entirely of the same two-dimensional shape. The Greeks believed that earth consisted of microscopic cubic particles, which explained why it was difficult to move earth. Meanwhile, the liquidity of water was explained by an appeal to the smoother shape possessed by the icosahedron, while fire was said to be painful to the touch because it consisted of the sharp particles in the form of tetrahedra. Air was thought to consist of octahedra since that was the only remaining Platonic solid. A little later, a fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, was discovered, and this led to the proposal that there might be a fifth element or “quintessence,” which also became known as ether. Although the notion that elements are made up of Platonic solids is regarded as incorrect from a modern point of view, it is the origin of the very fruitful notion that macroscopic properties of substances are governed by the structures of the microscopic components of which they are comprised. These “elements” survived well into the Middle Ages and beyond, augmented with a few others discovered by the alchemists, the precursors of modern-day chemists. One of the many goals of the alchemists seems to have been the transmutation of elements. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the particular transmutation that most enticed them was the attempt to change the base metal lead into the noble metal gold, whose unusual color, rarity, and chemical inertness have made it one of the most treasured substances since the dawn of civilization.

scholarly journals Do not give up! The importance of mistakes in the process of teaching and learning foreign languages

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 244
Author(s):  
Eduardo Dias da Silva ◽  
Romar Souza-Dias ◽  
Juscelino Francisco do Nascimento
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Learning Needs ◽  
Foreign Language Learners ◽  
Learning Programs

This paper aims to highlight the importance of errors and mistakes as an essential part in the process of teaching and learning foreign languages (FL). We understand that, while trying to produce meanings in the foreign language, learners, through some errors and mistakes, can develop the mental structures necessary for the consolidation of the target language. In this way, mistakes can e a strong tool indicator for teachers to assess and also to understand how far learners are in relation to the intended knowledge, according to objectives outlined in learning programs. The theoretical approach that orients our way of thinking is based on the point of view of some theorists, such as: Brito (2014); Corder (1967; 1985), Cavalari (2008); Richards and Rodgers (2004); Silva (2014); Simões (2007), among others. The results have demonstrated that the teacher, as a mediator of knowledge, must have a balanced attitude towards the students’ learning needs in order to help the learners to reach their best in the learning process. So, with this study, we expect that, in Teacher Education, mistakes could not be seen as something negative, but positive and necessary for the development of the student’s communicative competence.

The Adam Smith Problem: A Reinterpretation

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Lundestad
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Self Interest

As long as the market is said to be based on the motive of self-interest, any argument in favor of expanding the market will have to be seen as an argument in favor of self-interest. Such an argument, however, clearly conflicts with the notion that this motive, when viewed from a practical-political point of view, must be deemed a vice and thus, at best is something to be tolerated. As long as the market is seen as presupposing the motive of self-interest, as the currently dominating interpretation of Adam Smith implies, it therefore appears virtually impossible to see how Smith – or anyone else for that manner – can possibly justify extending the market in practical-political terms.

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