[B-Greek] Col. 1:13a causal pronoun FOLLOW Up2
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Apr 18 09:54:55 EDT 2004
At 5:49 AM -0700 4/18/04, waldo slusher wrote:
>These examples provided by Dr. Wheeler have so far
>only served to confirm to me that the PRONOUN clauses
>do NOT convey the semantic implicatures that are
>assigned to them. What I am having is a hard time
>taking adverbial grammatical features (means, result,
>concession, etc) and trying to transfer those
>functions to adjectival grammatical features. What I
>think Dr. Wheelerís examples illustrate is the
>tendency to see TOO MUCH in grammar.
...
>I really think we need to be careful not to import
>more into a text than it can bear. If one wants to
>teach relationships, by all means do so, but I really
>think we ought not to "confirm" our teachings by
>appealing to these grammatical relationships.
>
>Even with an adverbial participle, the author is not
>EXPLICITLY laying out the relationship between the
>clauses; he is relying on a contextual development.
>That is why multiple relationships can successfully be
>argued with a particular adverbial participle.
>
>We can certainly teach relationships that exist
>between clauses, but I would not appeal to the
>grammar. (Dr. Conrad, who I believe would agree with
>Dr. Wheeler, described this process as "divining" if I
>recall; I would agree with that description more so
>than appealing to a semantic one.)
I'm very sympathetic to this stance, Waldo; I really think it's not so very
far removed from what I myself said in my last message:
At 8:51 AM -0400 4/16/04, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> ... I have no intention of disputing what Dale Wheeler has said on this
>matter. I will only say that interpretation of these nuances may well be a
>matter of reading between the lines and guessing intelligently at what's
>going on in the mind of the writer; remember that in conversation--and
>often enough in writing also--we often have to "divine" what the person
>we're talking with is thinking about. In the first two chapters of
>Galatians I think there's need for a lot of such intelligent guesswork
>required in order to perceive what's implicit but left unspoken. At any
>rate, I don't really think this is something that can be cataloged in a
>neat list to be committed to memory; I think rather it's a matter of
>reading lots and lots more of Greek texts and attaining an intimate sort of
>familiarity with the substance of the larger text.
I remember still when I first realized that Latin "cum" and "quod" clauses
variously translated "since," "when," "although," "because" actually were
introduced by a particle that means no more than "it being the case that
..."; the same is true with the so-called "subjective" and "objective"
genitive: they are not semantic categories in Greek at all: the
speaker/writer uses them as syntactic links; even if he IMPLIES a more
precise meaning, that precise meaning is not at all EXPLICIT in the
syntactic link itself; it's something that one has to surmise from the
broader context--and making that surmise is always somewhat subjective.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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