Acts 7:59
Moon-Ryul Jung
moon at saint.soongsil.ac.kr
Thu Mar 22 05:35:38 EST 2001
>
> It may be helpful to look at the grammatical analysis of the sentence
> ELIQOBOLOUN TON STEFANON EPIKALOUMENON KAI LEGONTA ....
>
> The sentence in itself is very simple with a verb in imperfect (they were
> stoning- focusing on the duration of the process) followed by a complex noun
> phrase as object (NP-O). The NP-O consists of an arthrous head noun (the
> Stephen) and two coordinated accusative, present participles of which the second
> has a complement in the form of a quote. These two participles modify the head
> noun, so they describe Stephen at that time.
Dear Iver,
you seem to take the two participles as "attributive participles".
But TON STEFANON is definite enough not to require further modification.
Hence I would prefer to take the participles as predicative. If I use an
English example, "singing" in " I heard Mary singing" is predicative
rather than attributive with respect to "Mary". From the school grammar,
I learned it is a combination of two clauses: "I heard Mary" and
"Mary was singing". Did you find some reason that the Greek sentence
does not have a structure similar to "I heard Mary singing"?
By the way, Greek is much more flexible in combining clauses this way
than English. That is why the literal translation "
they were stoning Stephen calling out and saying..." sounds somewhat
unnatural and even confusing.
Sincerely
Moon
Moon-Ryul Jung
Sogang Univ,
Seoul, Korea
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