[B-Greek] (no subject)
Stephen Carlson
stemmatic at gmail.com
Wed Sep 15 16:36:00 EDT 2010
On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 12:25 PM, Carlton Winbery
<winberycl at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Stephen, I first was introduced to the terminology of "appositional Genitive" in A.T.
>Robertson (paragraph 4. p. 498). This use was common in Homer and Robertson lists
>multiple uses in the NT. The use is a step more than the basic function of the Genitive
>functioning to show kind or description. Both the substantive that is modified by the
>word in the genitive case and the word in the genitive refer to the same thing. Eg. city
>of Thyatyra. Both the noun city and the name of the city refer to the same reality, thus
>apposition.
Thanks for that; it has been helpful to me in crystallizing my
thinking about this genitive, and especially the terminology of it.
It looks like it goes under a variety of names. There is the
"genitive of apposition" which I recently saw in Mounce, but it's also
in Wallace, Brooks & Winberry, and Dana & Mantey. There's also
adjectival forms: "appositional genitive" (Robertson) and "appositive
genitive" (Funk, Smyth, Tuner/Moulton). Smyth also has a "genitive of
explanation." Some grammars recognize the epexegetical terminology
(Turner/Moulton has "genitivus epexegeticus"). So there is a hoary
tradition of referring to what I've been calling an epexegetical
genitive with a noun or adjectival form involving "apposition."
At one level, I can readily understand why: this genitive readily
functions like an apposition, which is a syntactic construct in which
the appositive explains or defines another noun (or pronoun).
Syntactically, however, it does this function by a different
mechanism: use of a genitive, instead of (syntactic) apposition.
I came across this issue in Mounce's textbook while teaching Greek
this term at Duke. On p. 52, Mounce explains one of the uses of the
genitive as follows: "In a general sense, if you have a noun that in
some way equals the meaning of another noun, the writer can put the
noun in the genitive, and it is said to be in *apposition* to the head
noun." (emphasis original)
So here Mounce isn't using the term "genitive of apposition," but
stating that this construction of the genitive is being in apposition.
(I looked up Wallace and found the term there, plus the pages of the
grammar where Wallace felt the need to explain the difference between
a "genitive of apposition" and a genitive "in simple apposition.")
I found Mounce's explanation objectionable because it seemed to be
calling a particular syntactic construction with a genitive by the
wrong term "apposition," which to me (and, e.g., in your Syntax book)
is the syntactic construction of juxtaposing a noun in the same case
to explain another. Here, Mounce's explanation of this genitive
seemed, when I read it, to exclude the very construct I had known as
apposition.
To be sure, Mounce's workbook, p. 18, supplies a definition of
apposition that confounds what I learned as apposition, in its
syntactic sense, with this genitive construction: "*Apposition* is a
construction that allows the author to use one noun to define another.
The noun that is in apposition will either be in the same case and
number as the word to which it is in apposition, or it will be in the
genitive regardless of the case of the other noun."
As a result, I had wondered if the terminology "genitive of
apposition" was the culprit for Mounce's understanding of apposition.
Since it seems to have been around a while (though also in adjectival
forms), maybe it isn't the culprit after all.
Stephen Carlson
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