[B-Greek] Intensive Pronoun Classification

Eric Rowe e_rowe at hotmail.com
Wed Feb 2 11:14:45 EST 2005


In an advanced Greek seminary course today we discussed classification of 
pronouns.

We noticed that Wallace discusses the intensive pronoun as a separate class 
from the personal pronoun.   Some of us found this strange, since the 
classification of personal pronoun has many different uses already.  Why 
shouldn't the intensive use just be another subcategory of the personal 
pronoun (since, after all, it is the same word)?

To add to the confusion, in Wallace's discussion of the intensive pronoun he 
claims that the main use of it is as a substitute for the personal pronoun.  
Moreover, in his discussion of the personal pronoun, he includes one use as 
the reflexive use, which, according to him only applies to the oblique 
cases.  But his discussion of the intensive pronoun proper (Eg. David 
himself, The Lord Himself, etc.) is restricted to the nominitive case.  
Couldn't the reflexive use of the personal pronoun include all cases, thus 
incorporating this intensive use of the so-called intensive pronoun?

Finally, is this classification on Wallace's part the norm among biblical 
Greek grammarians, or is it an idiosyncracy?  If it's the norm, what is 
behind it?

Thanks,
Eric Rowe





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