Morphological Tagging - A/M/P

Dale M. Wheeler dalemw at teleport.com
Thu Nov 1 11:17:19 EST 2001


Iver Larsen wrote:

>When it comes to grammatical tagging, I am wondering whether it would not be
>simpler - and linguistically more accurate - to drop the whole question of
>deponency - thank you, Carl -  keep the three tags A, M and P but make the
>distinction between M and P on contextual grounds only, not morphology, for
>all tenses. In that case, one would find a number of instances where a form
>is unquestionably middle in meaning, others which are unquestionably passive
>in meaning, but many which would need double tagging as either middle or
>passive. (I have suggested this to Tim Friberg, but whether he takes the
>suggestion, I don't know. There may be disadvantages that I don't see at the
>moment.)

I've been resisting jumping into this great discussion of deponency 
because...well, I'm just too busy fixing the grammatical tagging in the 
MorphLXX and MorphBHS right now.  But this is irresistible!!

As Editor of the GRAMCORD GNT, I guess the buck stops here!  Those of you 
who use GRAMCORD in some form will already know that GC does not tag for 
deponency, but rather has always tagged for A/M/P form.  Several years ago 
I thought about adding a deponent tag to GC, but the more I studied and 
analyzed the issue, the more I became convinced that, not only was 
"deponency" a wrong concept to describe what was going on with the majority 
(perhaps all) of Greek verbs, but tagging the text that way ultimately 
would lead users to the wrong conclusions about the verbs' actual function, 
esp., the middles.  Then Carl began his posts on the issue and I was 
convinced...thank you Carl!!!  So GC remains A/M/P. When that is not 
morphologically clear there are a couple of guidelines which are followed:

(1) follow BAGD (though I've not yet checked all of the lexemes against 
BDAG), unless they make a mistake or are inconsistent (perish the 
thought...but it happens!).  The reason for this is that BAGD has been 
scrupulous about looking at the history and use of a word to see if, when 
its "deponent", it occurs exclusively in the middle or the passive forms in 
the Aor and/or Fut.  If you look at the lexicon carefully you can see 
this...even though the lexeme listed will be Pres M/P form.  Thus GC parses 
ambiguous forms--Pres, Impf, Pf--as Mid or Pass based on that information.

(2) when #1 doesn't work--ie., the verb only occurs in M/P forms, but 
exhibits both Mid and Pass forms in the Aor/Fut--try to figure out if there 
are patterns to the use of the middle and passive and/or contextual clues 
that indicate whether a specific use is Mid or Pass. Let me hasten to add 
that the pattern analysis is limited to Koine...I heard one person mention 
the fact that he had found one or two active uses of a verb in 
Classical/early Hellenistic which in Koine was always M/P, and so, he 
concluded, it wasn't "deponent."  Well, it is wasn't "deponent", but not 
for that reason!  ERXOMAI is still "deponent" even though we do 
occasionally find, what LSJ calls, the barbaric ERXW!  This of course 
leaves the door open for interpretation...but the good thing is that with 
so many users, someone will most likely catch such interpretive errors and 
give some good data/reasons for rethinking the issue.

Currently I've got a list of verbs that I'm scratching my head about on 
this issue, esp., when they fall into category #2.  I've been demurring 
changing their lexemes and/or tags until I can do broader analyses of their 
uses in Koine and Hellenistic Greek.  In working thru the MorphLXX for the 
past couple of years in great detail I've found some interesting things 
which have helped solve some of the dilemmas...but there are others still 
up in the air.  If there are obvious errors, I'll fix them right away...but 
I'm planning on starting on a full scale analysis of this (and some other 
issues) starting this next summer, which will result in a new version of GC 
sometime after that.  So if any of you wish to opine on any of these 
issues, please do so...I can use all the help I can get...this is 
complicated stuff!!



***********************************************************************
Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Research Prof., Biblical Languages          Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan St.                                  Portland, OR 97220
V: 503-2516416        F: 503-251-6478      E: dalemw at teleport.com
***********************************************************************





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