[B-Greek] Genitive in 2 Cor 1:5 -- a semantic dimension

Chet Creider creider at uwo.ca
Sun Jun 6 16:19:53 EDT 2004


Please excuse the tardiness of this note.  It reflects my indecision about 
whether to add anything to a discussion that was interesting and with which 
I very largely agreed.  However, I feel that the semantic dimension has 
received less attention than it deserves, and for that reason am sending 
this commentary.  I have excluded all discussion of translation questions, 
partly because it is not something I know much about, but also because I 
believe that its consideration led to a devaluation of semantic matters.

In chronological order (I hope):
1. Bill Combs asked about the existence of a "causative genitive", a term 
used in a footnote in the NET Bible to the use of the genitive in 2 Cor 1:5.

Comment: note that this question, and the footnote, need have nothing to do 
with translation.  The question may be understood to mean, did speakers of 
NT Greek have a meaning, "causative", which could be expressed with the 
help of or via the genitive case (or, was a causative meaning a subtype of 
the meaning structure of the genitive in NT Greek)?

2. Carl Conrad replied that "the adnominal genitive is a structural 
category linking the genitive-case noun to another noun; there are no 
inherent semantic indicators in the Greek phrase as such;"

Comment: I think it is important to realize that Carl's claim is an 
hypothesis about the nature of the relationship between grammatical form 
and meaning.  If I understand him, he is claiming that structural 
categories of grammar have no semantic basis.  This is a defensible 
position, rather new in the history of the study of language (dating 
perhaps from the 1920s or 1930s) and no longer held by a minority of 
linguists (those who call themselves "cognitive linguists"), but one that a 
majority of linguists would subscribe to today.

The Byzantine grammarian Maximus Planudes (end of the 13th to beginning of 
the 14th c.) in two works, PERI SYNTACEOS AND PERI GRAMMATIKHS DIALOGOS, 
proposed a general theory in which the oblique cases (genitive, dative and 
accusative) had primary spatial meanings which were extended to temporal 
ones.  Wuellner (1827) extended this view to all the cases of both Latin 
and Greek.  Planudes and Wuellner's line of analysis came to be known as 
localism.  Anti-localists developed counter-theories asserting that the 
cases were syntactic; e.g. the accusative in Greek was the case of the 
object noun and the genitive was the case of the object noun in adnominal 
position.  Both approaches are still around (see Anderson 1973 and Miller 
1975 for localist approaches).

As far as the genitive in particular is concerned, the linguist Palmer in 
an article, "The language of Homer", writes that "in Indo-European the 
genitive is considered by some to have been primarily an adverbal case, the 
adnominal use being a secondary and narrowly restricted development.  But 
if we confine our analysis to the Greek facts, we may say that the basic 
function of the genitive when constructed with another noun (the adnominal 
genitive) is to denote the sphere or frame in which the governing noun is 
placed."

My point in citing these two theories is not to suggest that they are right 
but to show that it is possible to argue that there is a direct association 
between elements of grammar and meaning.

Carl concluded his first post with the observation that any notions of how 
the two elements ... are intended to be understood in relationship to each 
other must be derived altogether from the context or guessed at.

Comment: If, as some have argued, elements of grammar have core meanings, 
then the critical part of Carl's concluding observation might be rewritten 
as "must be derived from the interaction of the context with the core 
meaning of the construction."

3. Eddie asked if there is a way to keep the number of Genitives from 
proliferating.

4. Carl replied that "there are fundamentally three kinds of genitives:
(a) pertinentive/adnominal/adjectival indicating "belonging"
(b) partitive
(c) ablative

Comment: Carl seems to be giving 3 broad semantic categories here.  It is 
interesting to contrast Palmer, who gives 2: that discussed previously 
(which he terms the "pure" genitive (and which includes the partitive since 
that is "the whole from which a part is taken, used, tasted, etc.") and the 
"ablative" genitive.

5-6-7: interesting contributions by Eddie, Carl and Iver Larsen omitted here.

8. Randall Buth replied to Eddie's ?, How can we keep the number of 
Genitives to a workable size by indicating 4 grammatical contexts:
1. as a complement of a noun
2. as a complement of a verb
3. as a complement of a preposition
4. as an adverbial

He then indicated that EPEITA someone might "profitably subcategorize these 
by semantic structure...".  Also that "this is the legitimate function of 
someone writing a reference grammar or of someone collecting examples in 
pedagogical material, though the naming of categories is not normally a 
detailed part of learning a language.  It is normally part of looking at a 
language after a foundation is internalized and is in extensive use."

Comment: Although plausible, there are some prescriptive elements that 
perhaps are not warranted by current research.  It is very well known that 
children arrive at syntactic categories via semantic means.  I believe it 
is also well known that 2nd language learners tend to assume the semantic 
structures of their first languages when operating in the target 
language.  I would conclude from this that a _really_ good pedagogical 
approach to Greek for English L1 speakers would include an analysis of 
differences in the semantic systems of the two languages, including 
differences between the semantics of genitival expressions in English and 
Greek.  I agree with Randall that it should not be necessary to name the 
semantic categories.

Finally, I think that it very important to see the categories of Genitive 
used in a reference grammar not as ways to translate the genitive but as a 
theory of the semantic structure of the case.  The fact that the categories 
are given labels in English (or German, etc.) shouldn't obscure the fact 
that they are theoretical constructs that have nothing to do with 
translation into English.  Some grammarians actually devote much thought to 
deriving lower level semantic categories from higher level ones (Palmer is 
especially good at this, but so also are Smyth and Goodwin.  Unfortunately, 
our own Zerwick and BDF are not so thoughtful in this respect although 
their catalogues are still useful).  These conceptual frameworks translate 
into the modern "prototype" theory of cognition very nicely.

Chet Creider

P.S.  To save space I have given references in full.  Please write to ask 
if you would like a specific reference.

P.S.S.  Although not grammatical in nature, the tendency of L1 semantic 
categories to last long into extensive L2 use was illustrated in our 
household last night.  My wife, who has spoken English regularly for well 
over 30 years, speaks a first language in which one word is used for blue 
and dark green.  This occasionally has humorous aspects as when she tells 
me that the light has turned "blue" and that I should step on the gas, but 
last night she asked me to help her find a "green" piece of paper 
containing a phone number she needed.  We found it after much looking, but 
it turned out that it was "blue"!  I'm sure that I've similarly 
misunderstood Greek meanings time and time again because of unconsciously 
assuming they were like English ones.




More information about the B-Greek mailing list