Definiteness of Anarthrous Nouns in Prepositional Phrases

Jay Adkins JAdkins264 at aol.com
Tue Jul 25 06:23:20 EDT 2000


Dale M. Wheeler
> I ran just EN followed immediately by singular nouns and the results  
> were: 
>  
> 1) with article: 705x 
> 2) w/o article: 781x 
> 
> My own impression in reading the GNT is that the article with all  
> prepositions is omitted between 2/3 and 3/4 of the time, depending  
> on the author.  

Paul Dixon
> Thanks for the info on the EN constructs. Surely would be nice if we 
> could confirm your suspicions with data on some other prepositional 
> constructs, like EIS, KATA, etc. On the basis of the above data we 
> would probably say it is more like 1/2 of the time that the article is 
> omitted.  But, the real question is: how many of those anarthrous 
> constructs reflect definite nouns?  

While I cannot distinguish the number of definite nouns verses indefinite 
nouns, using Gramcord to search the use of a singular noun directly 
preceded by a preposition I had the following results.

1. with article: 2210   54.2%
2. w/o article:  1865   45.7%

If you have enough spare time, I would be glad to send you the list of 
verses so that you may determine which are definite nouns.  :-)

Sola Gratia,
	Jay Adkins
Always Under Grace!



More information about the B-Greek mailing list