[B-Greek] hINA in Jn 9:3, 11:4

Steve Runge srunge at logos.com
Wed Feb 4 19:27:09 EST 2009


Elizabeth,

Sim is not the first to consider conjunctions to be semantically empty. Here is the citation upon which much of Rick Brannan's paper on ALLA was based. I pulled the quote from his paper:

"Negatives, conjunctions, sentence connectors, and subordinators may be termed function words (Fries: 87-109) or structure signaling words (Roberts, 1958: 151f., 224ff.). The point of these labels is that such words are nearly lexically empty, i.e. they have little or no dictionary meaning of their own. However, they are grammatically significant in indicating the structure of sentences and parts of sentences (cf. §§001ff.). Some of them are so common as to require acquaintance at the grossest level of the language. This simply means that one must learn how they function early in the process. One may guess at the meaning of lexically full words, or leave them blank when reading (cf. §003), but one must know the grammatical "meaning" of
function words to be able to proceed at all."

Robert W. Funk, Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of Hellenistic Greek (Missoula, MT: Scholar's Press, 1973), §611 (p. 475).
http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/project/funk-grammar/pre-alpha/lesson-41.html

Here is the link to his paper on ALLA: http://www.supakoo.com/rick/papers/ALLA%20ETS%20National%202008.pdf)

Steve Runge

-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Elizabeth Kline
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 4:02 PM
To: greek B-Greek
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] hINA in Jn 9:3, 11:4


On Feb 4, 2009, at 7:23 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:

> I did not read through the whole dissertation but rather looked at 
> several sections of it.

Carl,

I found it fairly easy to misconstrue M.Sim's conclusions about particular passages  which involve hINA clauses if I didn't keep her framework constantly before me, particularly section 2.2.2.6  
Procedural Markers (pages 46-48) where she explains her claim that   
hINA, hOTI, GAR, DE ...  as semantically empty procedural markers.  
This is more or less the key to her entire project.  If this aspect of her framework is momentarily set aside,  some of her musings on lexical semantics might appear to be somewhat arbitrary. When I went back and reviewed chapter 2 a lot of what she said later began to make sense.

She claims that hINA has no native lexical value, that unlike nouns,  
verbs, adjectives and prepositions, hINA does not   have a 'meaning'  
nor does it have any fixed logical function (telic, ecbatic).  The main function of hINA is to mark the following text as a 'representation' of a thought, somewhat like the word "that" in english.

The fact that Sim takes particular positions in regard to interpretations of texts, for example, rejecting the telic understanding of the hINA clause in  Jn 9:3, 11:4, actually is a distraction from her main thrust. There is nothing about her notion of hINA as a procedural marker that would weigh against reading the hINA clause in Jn 9:3, 11:4 as telic, since according to her rules the telic aspect is an inference from the total context (textual, cultural, ...).

The irony of her reading on  Jn 9:3  (c.f. Jn11:4) is that IMHO Relevance Theory actually comes in as support for the telic reading of the hINA clause. Particularly in Jn 11:4, where everything about the death of Lazarus and Jesus words there cries out for a telic reading of hINA in Jn 11:4. It is worth noting that M. Sim does not cite  Jn
11:4 in her thesis.


Elizabeth




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