Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Adjectival and Adverbial PrepositionalPhrases in Biblical Greek.

Iver Larsen iver at larsen.dk
Fri May 13 02:10:19 EDT 2005


> Whether a particular prepositional phrase is adverbial or adjectival is,
> I suspect, almost always something that has to be inferred from the
> context rather than there being any syntactic rules.
>
> Consider the English sentence:
>
> 'I saw the man with my binoculars.'
>
> The prepositional phrase is ambiguous in that it may be modifying the
> verb 'saw' (I had the binoculars) or qualifying the noun phrase 'the
> man' (he had the binoculars).

Sometimes deep-structure, semantic distinctions are neutralized at the
surface level (the syntax) as here.
Your sentence has two possible semantic interpretations:
1. the semantic verb is "see" which is divalent, i.e. expects two
participants. One participant is the agent "I", another is the patient
"man". A preposition at the surface level often corresponds to adding a
semantic role, thereby changing the semantic verb from divalent to
trivalent. In this case the role added is "instrument", and the participant
filling that role is "my binoculars".

2. The semantic verb "see" remains divalent and is connected to two
participants. But the patient role is filled not by the simple noun "man",
but by a complex noun phrase consisting of the head noun "man" modified by a
rankshifted clause "who had my binoculars". In the semantic structure one
needs to supply an implicit verb like "have".
>
> I don't see how issues of governance really enters into dealing with
> this type of ambiguity in Greek.
>
> A hypothesis such as "META with the genitive is always adjectival and
> META with the accusative is always adverbial" may have merit on semantic
> grounds but I don't see it as being "because of case". A genitive
> prepositional phrase in general can be either adjectival or adverbial.

I don't see that it has merit on any grounds, and certainly not on semantic
grounds. The distinction between adjectival and adverbial is a syntactical
distinction only. It does not apply to the semantic level.

Iver Larsen




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