[B-Greek] Semantic Range of Prepositions
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sun Mar 21 08:49:23 EDT 2010
On Mar 20, 2010, at 5:10 PM, Richard Lindeman wrote:
> Although I agree that context is key, I am not sure that it is always
> entirely a matter of immediate context.
> I recall reading somewhere of a historical relationship existing between
> early noun case usage and
> the later introduction of prepositions. I suppose I will need to do some
> reading of classical Greek in order to get a better feel for what is
> happening later in the Koine.
Well, I think one does need to take into account the spatial vector signals;
one must also note the functional semantics of the cases owing to their
historical emergence: the genitive's ablatival ("away from") and partitive
("inclusive of") senses, the dative's locative ("in/on/at") and instrumental-
sociative ("with/by-means-of") senses and the accusative's limiting
("to/toward/into/up-to/bearing-upon") sense. Certainly it's worth studying
a good listing of prepositional usages such as Smyth (§1636ff.) -- very
much worth a careful reading, I think; BDF (§§203-40), and then there's
Wallace GGBB (pp. 356-389). One should pay careful attention to how
case meanings are reflected in the distinctive senses of those prepositions
that are used with more than one case. Some of them are somewhat
tricky: PARA means something like "facing"; with genitive it's "from
the presence of", with dative "facing", and with accusative "to the
presence of" or even "opposite to"); KATA means "down"; with
genitive it's "down from", with acc. "down along/following").
DIA is tricky; with genitive it's "inclusive of/from one-end-to-other
of", with accusative it's "by way of." One must be aware that EN,
although most commonly used with a locative dative to indicate
place or time, is quite commonly used in NT Koine with an
instrumental dative in the sense, "with/by-means-of."
These are useful things to learn about the prepositions, but ultimately
one really learns them by reading or listening voluminously and seeing
and hearing them over and over as they do their own things in spoken
or written usage.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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