[B-Greek] Left order prominence and construction -- Acts 5.18

Iver Larsen iver_larsen at sil.org
Thu Dec 28 04:59:09 EST 2006


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "George F Somsel" <gfsomsel at yahoo.com>


> I'm wondering what Iver's theory would say regarding the usage of DHMOSIAi in this verse.
>
> KAI EPEBALON TAS CEIRAS EPI TOUS APOSTOLOUS KAI EQENTO AUTOUS EN THRHSEI DHMOSIAi
>
> george
> gfsomsel

No problem (after correcting your various typos):

And they laid hands on the apostles and put them in a public jail.

DHMOSIAi is an adjective that occurs in its expected position after the noun it modifies. It is just 
a (public) JAIL, not a PUBLIC jail. There is no prominence to the final adjective. At the clause 
level, the dative complement of to "put" (a trivalent verb) is in the least prominent position. 
There is nothing surprising about them being put in a public jail after they have been "laid hands 
on". The adjective DHMOSIOS carries so little semantic weight when combined with THRHSIS that it is 
left out in the similar sentence in Acts 4:3. On the other hand THRHSIS is a more general word than 
English jail, basically meaning "(place of) keeping", so the word DHMOSIOS helps to clarify that the 
text is talking about an official place for keeping alleged criminals, what we call a jail.

There is much more prominence to DHMOSIAi in Acts 16:37 as shown by the relative placement of the 
constituents.

Iver Larsen




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