著者

長瀬 真理

出版者

日本西洋古典学会

雑誌

西洋古典学研究 (ISSN:04479114)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.35, pp.69-80, 1987

被引用文献数

1

---

The questions of the authenticity and chronology of Plato's texts are long-standing arguments This paper deals with the analysis of some prose style 'concerned with word order. One of the particular features of the Greek language is its freedom with word order The choice of word order is supposed to reflect personal habit or style which can be defined by studying the frequencies of certain patterns of combination of words. The conclusions are based on data obtained in a pilot computer project organized by Dr. L Brandwood from the University of Manchester in which I participated from October 1, 1980 to March 31, 1982 The purpose of the project is to investigate some specific stylistic features of texts from different periods of Plato's career, with the aim of producing certain quantitative measures of sentence structure and establishing new methods or principles of stylistic comparison The study was carried out usmg a system of classifying elements of sentence according to their syntactic function. The categories and code numbers are twelve : noun (0), verb(1), direct object (2), indirect object (3), predicate (4), attributes of these items (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), adverb (62) and prepositional phrase (63) The combinations of word order in each category are checked according to two patterns, 'coordinate' and 'split' The coordinate is the case where more than two words of the same class are used in parallel position m a sentence The split means the gap between a word and other related words in the same class The Greek texts of Plato were already available to us on magnetic tape Among Plato's writing we chose three texts, Laches, Theaetetus, and Philebus which are generally agreed to come from three different periods of his life We were also able to obtain a tape of Xenophon from which Memorabilia was chosen In order to check the consistency of our measures withm individual works, each text was sub-divided into four sections As the project is still underway, it is too early to make many claims for our methods. But I can say that in this instance, at least, checking word order has proved an effective measure of stylistic difference. It is fully recognised that the style of Philebus stands out clearly from that of the other three dialogues The figures for coordinate and split in Philebus are extremely high compared with the other three, especially in the case of the split in the prepositional phrases. We could say, 'the greater the frequency of splits, the more complicated the sentence' Philebus is commonly grouped chronologically with Leges, Timaeus, Pohticus and Sophistes as belonging to the later period of Plato's writing These dialogues are famous for being difficult to read It is an open question how far our syntactic code system would cover the complicated implication of sentence structures But whatever the interpretation, it is important to have some quantifiable and objective methods with which to work.