genitive between prep & case

Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3355
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: genitive between prep & case

Post by Stephen Carlson »

MAubrey wrote:I invariably read "ATR" as "advanced tongue root" btw
Sounds like a name for a band.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
Contact:

Re: genitive between prep & case

Post by cwconrad »

Stirling Bartholomew wrote: Carl,

I didn't think it was rare, just wondered why none of the NT grammars discussed it. I think maybe the problem is our very old reference grammars like BDF and ATR assume that everyone knows Attic syntax so anything that would be normal in Attic syntax just isn't worth discussing. This is a very wrongheaded approach if your intending to write a comprehensive grammar of a language. Cooper thought it was worth discussing and offered a very concise and understandable presentation with loads of examples. Anyone attempting to write a comprehensive reference grammar for the 21st Century reader is going to need to cover all the bases, not just comment on how Koine is different here and there from Attic or Homer or Herodotus.

I really didn't post this as a question. Just an observation of pattern which I found interesting. I collect syntax patterns like some people collect old cars.
Well, I've done my own collecting of patterns, way back in the days when 5x7 index cards were the device for keeping records for collation ... seems like (and is) ancient history. But I wonder about this matter of reference grammars and what you're saying about them here. For one thing I don't think there'll be an exhaustive reference grammar for the Greek of "our" era -- certainly not in my lifetime. Perhaps it would be worth discussing what and how much ought to be covered in an "exhaustive" Koine grammar (surely we wouldn't want a grammar limited to the NT corpus, would we?)? And while we might complain about a Koine grammar assuming a reader's familiarity with Attic, would we really trust a grammar composed or compiled by someone who doesn't know the earlier (and later) phases of the language?

These big grammatical compilations are the work of a lifetime, aren't they? -- put out in new editions that are revised over and over? There are things we look for in ATR and don't find, sometimes because we don't know where it's buried -- indexing is so important! It may not really be so, but I don't cease to find Smyth astoundingly useful even for questions arising in reading of Koine because there doesn't seem to be much that's worth asking that he doesn't say something helpful about.

We've talked about Porter's Idioms; neither Porter's Idioms nor Wallace's GGBB is satisfying.They both bring to mind what we used to say about commentaries, namely, that they answer questions you didn't ask and don't answer the questions that you're looking for answers to. The simple fact is that we don't all ask the same questions. Aristotle rightly says that serious exploration begins in wonder; so, it's a matter of what rouses our curiosity. ATR was evidently immensely curious and never forgot anything he's researched. The greatness of Eduard Fraenkel's commentary on the Agamemnon of Aeschylus is that it explores so many questions that few ever thought of asking before; that's also true of W.S. Barrett's commentary on Euripides' Hippolytus.. It's commentaries like these that really enrich an understanding of the language. Are any commentators on NT literature doing anything comparable for Koine Greek?

I guess I've changed the subject; if this is worth talking about, it probably belongs elsewhere.
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Stirling Bartholomew
Posts: 1141
Joined: August 9th, 2012, 4:19 pm

Re: genitive between prep & case

Post by Stirling Bartholomew »

Stephen Carlson wrote: Is there anything more to this pattern than meets the eye? It seems like it can be described compositionally: PP = prep + NP; NP = gen + N | etc. There really isn't anything that can't be explained here by the sum of the parts, is there? Perhaps there's some matter of pragmatics involved in the fronting of the genitive, but syntactically the pattern looks pretty vanilla to me. Or am I missing something?

Stephen,

I set up a simple NT search for εν or εις to see how often the word (noun, adj, pronoun, article) following them agrees with their case (εν dat εις acc). roughly 4480 hits. I then searched how many times εν and εις were followed by a genitive (noun, adj, pronoun, article) and another search for any other case that didn't agree with the case of εν or εις. Three hits, all genitives.

Not very vanilla.

This isn't rocket science. Some of the 4480 hits will be false since the tagging is imperfect.
C. Stirling Bartholomew
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3355
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: genitive between prep & case

Post by Stephen Carlson »

I'm referring to vanilla syntax, not juxtaposition of words. The juxtaposition may be rare, but I haven't seen anything unusual from a syntactic perspective. Nor is the interpretation in doubt. Noun phrases can be governed by a preposition, and noun phrases can have a preposed genitive modifier. Every once in a while both possibilities happen to coincide, but there's no interaction between them, so there's nothing really interesting going on that a separate treatment of the parts won't cover (IMHO).
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
MAubrey
Posts: 1095
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 8:52 pm
Contact:

Re: genitive between prep & case

Post by MAubrey »

Stephen Carlson wrote:I'm referring to vanilla syntax, not juxtaposition of words. The juxtaposition may be rare, but I haven't seen anything unusual from a syntactic perspective.
Exactly.

A preposition doesn't form a phrase with the very next word that follows it. A preposition forms a phrase with a complete noun phrase. And whether the first word of that noun phrase is a genitive is inconsequential.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3355
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: genitive between prep & case

Post by Stephen Carlson »

English also allows a possessive/genitive to follow a preposition: e.g. in John's car. The case alternation is most evident with personal pronouns: compare for me and for my wife. I think these cases are about the interesting as the Greek examples.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Post Reply

Return to “Syntax and Grammar”