[B-Greek] Event words

Elizabeth Kline kline-dekooning at earthlink.net
Mon Aug 29 11:37:02 EDT 2005


On Aug 29, 2005, at 2:55 AM, Carl W. Conrad wrote:

> Are there (in descriptive linguistics) regular categories for items  
> such as this? It seems to me that verbal nouns (e.g. PAROUSIA) must  
> often fall into this category of "event words"; we don't have a  
> gerund in Greek as such but we do have the articular infinitive,  
> verbal nouns in -SIS/-TIS like PRAXIS, which can sometimes refer to  
> a process in progress. Who has discussed this sort of thing and  
> where might I best read more about matters such as this?

Dr. Conrad,

The literature on semantic analysis is vast and my knowledge of it is  
not. One classic work often cited is: Chafe, Wallace L. Meaning and  
the Structure of Language Chicago 1970. In reference to NT semantics:  
J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Lexical Semantics of New Testament Greek,  
Scholars Press, 1992 and J. P. Louw, The Semantics of New Testament  
Greek, Fortress 1982.

Wallace Chafe Chapter Nine page 95-104 is titled States, Processes  
and Actions. On page 99 Chafe says "A nonstate is a 'happening," an  
event". The introduction to the dictionary by Louw and Nida (page vi)  
mentions events as one of three broad semantic categories under class  
referents: entities,events, abstracts.

Cognitive linguistics is the current thing in lexical analysis of  
Biblical languages. There is a UBS project under way for developing a  
Biblical Hebrew dictionary which will use the concept of Frames to  
organize the semantic hierarchy of Biblical Hebrew. Papers on this  
project can be found here:  http://www.sdbh.org/

The notion of Frame is similar to the popular term Context. But  
"context" is too vague to be useful. If we say that the lexeme DOXA  
is found in an event frame we are not saying that DOXA itself refers  
to an event. What we are saying is that DOXA is used in a semantic  
situation (Frame) which has semantic component Event.

Elizabeth Kline







More information about the B-Greek mailing list