[B-Greek] Mk 5:8 voc or nom?

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Dec 5 17:18:27 EST 2004


At 2:25 PM -0600 12/5/04, Steven Lo Vullo wrote:
>On Dec 5, 2004, at 7:04 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
>>> Vocative is correct. It is important to keep in mind that neuter nouns
>>> have the same form in the nominative and vocative. Also, you shouldn't
>>> think of a vocative as being in apposition to an unexpressed subject,
>>> since a vocative is not grammatically related to the rest of the
>>> sentence.
>>
>> One question I'd raise about this is whether there is a vocative form
>> of
>> the article; there's no question, of course, that the nominative plural
>> with the article is used in place of a vocative, but I'd still wonder
>> whether there are any indisputable instances of a singular vocative
>> definite article.
>
>That's a good question, Carl. The Accordance GNT-T tags the article
>here as vocative. The displaced GNT has vocative as a variant tag. But
>this is also the case with the articles and the participles they
>substantivize in Rom 2.21-22. I suspect this tagging has to do with
>function more than anything else.

Yes, Steven, I think you're right, and that's a reason why I am
uncomfortable with the tagging practice; we've already seen that the
tagging is wrong with regard to TI in Gal 3:6--I'm not sure what the
occasion of that error in tagging was but it's curious that other taggers
have made the same error. For my part I really don't like tagging to be
based on functional considerations rather than morphological. In off-list
correspondence I've been discussing comparable problems with the tagging of
"middle" and "passive" verb-forms as EITHER M or P in terms of
interpretation of the function rather than in terms of morphology. While it
may be true that the parsing is useful primarily to those who cannot read
Greek very fluently and need to piece the elements of a text together
syntactically, I personally think we ought to draw a distinction between
morphological analysis and syntactic analysis, and it seems to me that the
tagging wavers somewhat in practice between those two--and I doubt if this
is simply the case with tagging in Accordance--it seems to be the case with
the Friberg tagging too. I personally would prefer to describe the usage in
Mk 5:8 TO PNEUMA TO AKAQARTON as nominative used for vocative--but in FORM
nominative, NOT vocative.
-- 

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/



More information about the B-Greek mailing list