MELLW followed by Present
Alex / Ali
alexali at surf.net.au
Wed Nov 13 09:28:38 EST 2002
Dale Noonan noted that 'nearly all the infinitives following MELLW are in
the present tense' and asked 'What is it about MELLW that seems to call for
a present tense verb to complete the action?'
Thanks to Maurice O'Sullivan and Carl who have suggested a couple of leads.
Here are some others:
John Thornley, in his article 'Aktionsart in N.T. Greek: Infinitive and
Imperative' (Novum Testamentum, XXXI (1989), 290-315, speaks of
"syntactically determined present infinitives" and gives the following
statistics for infinitives after MELLW: "7 aorists occur and 5 futures,
compared with 79 presents" (p293); at page 299 he says, "Luke's own liking
for MELLW comes out in Acts, where the word occurs more frequently than in
any other NT writer - and 5 times with a very classical future infinitive,
which does not occur elsewhere in the NT with MELLW."
I'd be interested, Dale, if you could confirm Thornley's figures. When I
looked at this some time ago, I came up with a scoreline as follows: MELLW +
present infinitive, 81 times; + aorist infinitive, 7 times (4 in
Revelation), + future infinitive, 3 times (all in Acts, at 11:28, 24:15,
27:10).
See BDF 338(3) for a discussion of the construction, especially the comment,
"In the papyrus the aorist infinitive is used most often with MELLEIN, the
present infinitive belongs to the vulgar idiom, and the future is found only
occasionally in official documents."
Porter discusses MELLW with the infinitive on pages 488-489 in his appendix
on catenative constructions.
Alex Hopkins
Melbourne, Australia
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