Browsing by Author "Grenert, Briana"

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    Finding borders in Genesis : defining Jewish and Christian community through Late Antique Biblical exegesis
    (2018) Grenert, Briana
    The project of this thesis is to examine Jewish and Christian rivalry and cross-pollination through an analysis of the methods and traditions which sources mobilize to make sense of Genesis 6:1-4.
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    The Shape of Eta: Evolutionary Phonology and the Development of Attic Greek [£:]
    (2018) Grenert, Briana; Chandlee, Jane
    Blevins's Evolutionary Phonology model has not previous been employed in analyzing sound changes in dead languages (Blevins, 2004). Here, I present evidence from Attic Greek, and follow the evolution of the pronunciation of grapheme eta <11< as a sound change for EP to explain. Eta during the fifth century BeE was pronounced as [s:J, but today is pronounced as [i]. I create a rubric by which to apply EP to my account of eta, tracking which EP mechanisms could be at play and different points in eta's development, and analyzing ifEP would predict the results. I have discovered that EP does describe the change from [s:] to [i] very effectively, accounting for both the loss of phonemic vowel length and the raising of [s] to [i]. However, EP, due to its nonteleological nature, is unable to provide an explanation for why this change occurred. In short, while it has great descriptive power, it lacks the explanatory power of a useful theory of sound change.