[B-Greek] Subject, or appositive to the subject indicated bt the person inflection
Randy Leedy
Rleedy at bju.edu
Fri Mar 3 11:58:59 EST 2006
Thanks to Bitan Buth and Chet Creider for illuminating replies. Time
pressures (as usual) will prevent my entering into discussion at length;
here I toss out just a couple of comments.
Bitan adduced the example EPINOEIS KAI AUTOS. I would definitely see
AUTOS here as a strong candidate for appositive rather than subject (if
I may continue to use traditional terminology) because of the common use
of that word as an intensifier, which practically demands a head word. I
might still for the sake of simplicity call it a subject myself, but I
certainly would not try to dissuade someone who thought the appositional
construction is required here. The second example is less clear to me,
since the adjectives could be understood as having substantival
function.
Chet mentions a construction with an accusative participle adverbial to
an infinitive without explicit subject, even though the participle's
referent appears in the nominative in the main clause. I guess we're a
bit off the track from my question itself here, but I do recall seeing
at least one such instance somewhere in the NT, though I cannot put my
finger on it right now. I appreciate your statement, Chet, that my
question doesn't seem to be pursued in detail in the literature on Greek
and I also appreciate the expansion into general matters of linguistics.
If I am reading you correctly, you are saying you consider my point of
view reasonable given the current state of understanding, though in the
passage I cited you would have taken the article as the head word of the
phrase rather than PANTES. It is not clear in my mind whether the
article in such a construction governs the adjective or qualifies it. I
understand its history as a pronoun, but the impression I get is that in
the Koine it is used to qualify a head word or expression much more
often it serves as a head word itself. But this gets into another
question that I have not seen treated at any length in the grammars, and
I don't want to spend any time on that question just now.
Thanks again,
Randy Leedy
Bob Jones University Seminary
Greenville, SC
RLeedy at bju.edu
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