[B-Greek] 2Cor 3:15-16 hHNIKA ... AN

yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net
Mon Feb 8 02:27:20 EST 2010


Donald said:
> On the other hand, if I say, "Everytime I go to the store, I buy some 
> eggs", we understand that 1) I am in the habit of going to the store, 
> and 2) when I do that, I habitually buy eggs. The semantic focus is 
> totally different, and it would be a misuse of language to say that this 
> sentence is conditional. It's not. Yes, of course my buying eggs is 
> contingent on my going to the store--*but that is not the focus of the 
> sentence and it is not the content that the grammar of the sentence is 
> communicating.*


I'm not sure I understand the reasoning here nor the use of the term "conditional." At the risk of exhausting an already exhausted subject, I wonder if taking a slight detour might help. If you are tired of this discussion, please skip this note. Whenever I tired of tire of it, I did the same! 

Cognitive linguistics has pushed the discussion of conditionals in intersting directions. I am no expert here, but I wonder if some of the insights of that field might provide a helpful outsider point of view to traditional discussions of conditionals in Koiné and Classical Greek conditionals.  Angeliki Athanasiadou and René Dirven ("Pragmatic Conditionals" in Constructions in Cognitive Linguistics 2000, I think) suggest three meta-categories of conditionals (the terminology may sound a bit strange):

Hypothetical conditionals--the consequent fully depends upon the realization (or nonrealization) of the antecedent. Such as "If it rains tomorrow, we will stay at home." 

Course-of-event conditionals--describe regularly co-occurring sequences of events *somehow* causally related, but not strictly construed as such, i.e. the two events are not construed as simply triggering one another but just as co-occurring. Such as "If there is a drought, the eggs remain dormant." One might see that this type of conditional utterance, transposed into the past might be a handy category for discussing the hHNIKA AN problem in Exodus 34:34. "Whenever X, Z." Of course that does not necessarily mean, without X no Z. Despite the dependence upon this passage, 2 Cor 3:14-15 become hypothetical when transposed into the aorist subjunctive and present tenses.

Pragmatic conditionals--a quite complex relation between the conditional form and pragmatic meaning, as in "If you are hungry, we are having dinner at six."

The crucial difference between Course-of-event conditionals and Hypothetical and Pragmatic conditionals is the type of inferencing process involved, the nature of the evidence. The inferencing process in Course-of-event conditionals is about events conceived as really occuring in time. The mental process in other types of conditionals is about explicating a given concept that need not involve any actual situation, but may be a purely logical operation in the mind. I think the problem some of the interolutors were having was the undue restriction of the concept of conditionality that seemed to exclude concomitance. Such a restricted sense of conditionality does not seem to fit natural language very well and might well fail to address the problems that arise with many of the conditional utterances we use in day to day speech and, I suspect, in Koiné Greek.


Yancy Smith, PhD
yancywsmith at sbcglobal.net
Y.W.Smith at tcu.edu
yancy at wbtc.com
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