[B-Greek] Assimilation of the Relative (was Attraction of theRelative ...)

Elizabeth Kline kline_dekooning at earthlink.net
Tue Dec 15 14:44:37 EST 2009


Thank you Iver,


On Dec 14, 2009, at 11:42 PM, Iver Larsen wrote:

> Cooper's theory does not stand up to scrutiny, which is easy to see  
> if you look
> at relatives in the accusative. The first one in the GNT is in
>
> Mat 2:9: ὁ ἀστήρ, ὃν εἶδον ἐν τῇ  
> ἀνατολῇ, προῆγεν αὐτούς
> hO ASTHR, hON EIDON EN THi ANATOLHi, PROHGEN AUTOIS
> the star, which they had seen in the east, went ahead of them
>
> In this case the relative clause qualifies a noun in the nominative.  
> In that way
> it is like an adjective and it is part of the noun phrase that  
> functions as
> subject in the main clause. A sentence as a whole does not have a  
> function in
> another sentence. A sentence does not have a case function. It is  
> phrases that
> have syntactic functions in a clause and these functions are marked  
> by case. hON
> is accusative above because it is the object of EIDON within the  
> relative
> clause.
>
> An interesting example of the nominative relative is found in
>
> Mat 18:28: ἐξελθὼν δὲ ὁ δοῦλος ἐκεῖνος  
> εὗρεν ἕνα τῶν συνδούλων αὐτοῦ, ὃς  
> ὤφειλεν
> αὐτῷ ἑκατὸν δηνάρια
> EXELQWN DE hO DOULOS EKEINOS hEUREN hENA TWN SUNDOULWN AUTOU, hOS  
> WFEILEN AUTWi
> hEKATON DHNARIA
> That slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves, who owed him  
> hundred
> dinarii
>
> hOS refers back to hENA - the head of the noun phrase "one of his  
> slaves", and
> it is in the nominative because it functions as subject in its own  
> relative
> clause.
>
> So, attraction does not occur for nominative or accusative  
> antecedents, only for
> genitive and dative  - unless someone can show me an example against  
> this
> theory.


I don't see how the accusative examples really undermine G.Cooper's  
approach.

It seems reasonable to start out with certain assumptions about  
G.Cooper. Generally speaking someone who manages to get an academic  
press (U Michigan) to publish a Greek reference grammar running four  
volumes and 3500 pages will probably be aware that assimilation of the  
relative is found with datives and genitives, a fact that should be  
known by any third semester seminarian. Cooper mentions this  
restriction in the quoted paragraph but I snipped "..." it out.

  Cooper's treatment in vol 1 51.10.0-10.13 and vol 3 51.9.0-9:12 is a  
detailed nuanced discussion of a complex topic. I quoted less than one  
paragraph from several thousand words and hundreds of examples. We  
cannot hold e-mail discussions about details if we are always required  
to build the grammar from the ground up. So why don't start by  
assuming we are dealing with intelligent and informed authors,  
competent in their field rather than waste time typing paragraphs like  
this one?



> A sentence as a whole does not have a function in
> another sentence. A sentence does not have a case function. It is  
> phrases that
> have syntactic functions in a clause and these functions are marked  
> by case.


It appears that we have a problem here with meta-language.  To say  
that a relative sentence/clause can function as a complex **virtual**  
constituent in another sentence/clause is a perfectly acceptable  
statement in the several linguistic frameworks I am familiar with.  
This is reflected in the way subordinate sentence/clauses are linked  
to their antecedents when building parsing diagrams of complex  
hypotaxis found in NT books like Hebrews. The subordinate sentence/ 
clause as a whole can be understood as performing some function  
relative to sentence/clause which contains the antecedent. I don't see  
anything controversial about Cooper's proposal.

Assimilation of the relative is  a special case, the general rule  
(Cooper v1 51.9.1) "The case of relative is determined within the  
relative sentence ... accordingly the relative may be any of the the  
four cases depending on the function ..." within the relative sentence/ 
clause.  We need an explanation of assimilation which goes beyond  
attaching a label "attraction" which tells us nothing about the why  
assimilation takes place. Cooper ventures in to the domain of "telling  
us why", there are with out a doubt going to be objections to his  
proposal, but the other grammars in my library don't even venture into  
the domain. The seem to assume that attaching a meaningless label  
"attraction" solves the problem.

Let's not get bogged down arguing about G.Cooper. If someone wants to  
propose another explanation of  assimilation which takes into account  
all the data, I am willing to listen.

Elizabeth Kline







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