[B-Greek] Attributive and Predicate
Mark Lama
markosl80 at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 5 17:53:38 EST 2004
I think of it this way, Mitch. "The man is good" is a sentence, "The good man" is a not, it is just a noun phrase. hO ANHR AGAQOS/AGAQOS hO ANHR contain an implied verb, ESTIN. ESTIN can be and is very often dropped in Greek, leaving a purely nominal sentence. (Blass-Debrunner-Funk has helpful information on the omission of the copula in the NT) hO AGAQOS ANHR/hO ANHR hO AGAQOS, being simply noun phrases, can be used as the subject (or with change of case the object, etc.) of a verb. So if you simply want to state the goodness of the man, you can say "The man is good." But if you want to use the good man in your sentence, you need a noun phrase. The distinction arises in the way a language uses grammar to communicate.
CARIS KAI EIRHNH,
Mark Lama
Mitch Larramore <mitchlarramore at yahoo.com> wrote:
Maybe it's because I am reading elementary Greek
books, but I don't understand the "semantical"
difference between the Attributive and Predicate
positions of the adjective. I see the syntactical
difference, but what is the semantical difference.
"The good man" and "the man is good" doesn't strike me
as being all that different, just a different way to
state the same semantical thing. I realize the
Attributive attributes a quality to the noun where the
Predicate predicates something about the noun. Now
that I understand how to construct the difference, why
did they?
=====
Mitch Larramore
Spring Branch, Texas
Student/Memorial High School
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