dative "direct object"
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Oct 18 07:00:41 EDT 2002
forwarded for George Somsel <Polycarp66 at aol.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 01:07:03 EDT
In a message dated 10/18/2002 12:09:58 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
cc.constantine at worldnet.att.net writes:
>on 10/17/02 8:33 PM, Steven Lo Vullo wrote:
>
>>I have always taken for granted the category "dative direct object."
>>However, in the course of reading the GNT and thinking about the verbs
>>that are commonly described as taking a dative "direct object," I have
>>come to wonder why the dative in such cases is described in this way.
>>Are there good reasons to think of this use of the dative as a true
>>direct object, or is there a better way to explain the phenomenon?
>
>One option is to scrap the whole subject-object-indirect_object approach and
>adopt an semantic functional scheme instead. The main verb of a clause can
>be thought of as having zero or more arguments. Each argument can be
>classified as an agent, patient, recipient, goal . . . But there is no
>universally accepted working set of semantic functions. One needs to remain
>somewhat flexible to use this approach.
>
>The subject-object scheme is clunky. The Mounce-Wallace types still make use
>of it and the end up burying themselves in mountain of qualifications which
>is self defeating.
>
I don't think that the problem is with the subject-object scheme. The
problem is more interlingual. Certain words in English tend to take a
direct object and are called transitive. We seem to expect that the
situation will be the same in Greek. When it is not we jump through all
kinds of hoops to explain it. In the case of so-called 'Dative Direct
Objects' the explanation for many, if not for all, seems relatively simple.
Certain verbs frequently take a dative such as PISTEUW or hUPAKOUW. I
would not say that Wallace, e.g., buries himself "in a mountain of
qualifications" regarding this. These are verbs which exhibit a personal
relationship. Perhaps part of the problem is in regard to our conception
of the meaning of the verb itself. We tend to say "I believe that/him"
rather than "I ** am confident in ** that" or "I ** trust in ** him."
Perhaps we should redefine the category of dative here to avoid the concept
of its being a direct object since it doesn't really function as an object
at all. If we attempt to discard the subject-object relationship, I tend
to think we will only end up as PLANWMENOI -- hopefully not for forty years.
gfsomsel
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