Ibai mag blinds blindana tiuhan? (Luke 6,39). Pragmatic functions and syntactic strategies in the Gothic left sentence periphery

Abstract

Nowadays it is commonly accepted that in the old and modern Indo-European languages the so-called left periphery of the sentence marks the interface between syntax and discourse/context features. The present paper deals with the analysis of the left sentence periphery in Gothic. For this purpose the behaviour of the following linguistic elements will be analysed: (a) interrogative particles; (b) sentence introducers in relative clauses; (c) textual connectors. On the basis of the consideration – corrobora ted through interlinguistic comparison – that the discourse layer finds a specific formalization in the syntactic structure, the main aim of the present study is to investigate how and to what extent a different pragmatic function of the aforementioned elements correlates with a specific syntactic representation. The interference role of the Greek and Latin source texts will also be taken into consideration, mainly in order to ascertain whether the grammaticalization processes which those elements underwent were either induced or implemented by the models. Finally, it will be proved that a deeper understanding of the sentence structure can fruitfully be applied to text-based hermeneutics, since it allows to better recognize those variation phenomena within the Gothic language which are detectable in the lucky – albeit scanty – evidence provided by the double-recension textual portions.