Participle/Finite Verb constituent order (again!)

Daniel Riaño danielrr at retemail.es
Mon Jul 24 17:19:03 EDT 2000


clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:

>  I was just now taking a look at Homer's Iliad book 1 line 311 and
>noted:
>
>hEISEN AGWN
>
>I was wondering if someone would like to explain the connection between word
>order and temporal relationships here. It seems that  AGWN could be either
>prior to  hEISEN, or it could be a general idea which takes into view the
>whole event or AGWN may be an action which transpires after hEISEN.

	As Carl W. Conrad wrote in reply, this case is an example of 
modal, not temporal predicative. Participial predicatives are very 
often placed after the main verb with modal, causal, explicative, 
final, etc. value (I calculate about 50 % of all the part. 
predicatives in Thucydides and Xenophon), but purely temporal part. 
subjective predicatives postponed to the governing verb are very rare 
(less than 1% of all part. predicatives). One case is:

ei)si\ d' ai(\ kai\ oi)kh/toras mete/balon a(lisko/menai "some (sc. 
of the cities) shifted their inhabitants after being sized" Th.1.23.2

Most of the cases I found have at least a modal nuance or are doubtful, like:
a)/lla te e)ka/koun periple/ontes Th.2.25.1
a)ll' u(/steron dh\ ta/ te makra\ tei/ch w)/|khsan kataneima/menoi 
kai\ tou= Peiraiw=s ta\ polla/. Th.2.17.3


	Now the conditions under which pred. part. can be so used are 
still left to be defined by someone like you, Clayton!
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas
Madrid, España



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