Case form of Participles used as Verb Compliments
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Apr 21 17:13:48 EDT 1999
At 1:28 PM -0700 4/21/99, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>Thanks Carl,
>
>Ya know after years of starring at NT Greek participles they still give
>me pause. The problem is the dual function. It just seems like a messy
>way to do things, having a single instance of a single form in a single
>context serving more than one function. It raises some of the same kind
>of problems one runs into in lexical semantics with multiple
>simultaneous sense or reference. A Pandora's box so to speak.
And suppose that you had to speak French every day, and had to adjust the
participle everytime you changed from saying of a man, "il s'en est allé"
to saying the same thing of a woman, "elle s'en est allée" or of several
men, "ils s'en sont allés" or of several woman "elles s'en sont
allées"--you would, of course, be doing that without even thinking, and I
really don't think that an ancient Greek-speaker had to do much thinking
about what ending to put on a participle either.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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