Re: Identifying grammatical meaning of cases

From: Edgar M. Krentz (emkrentz@mcs.com)
Date: Mon Jan 22 1996 - 20:27:11 EST


> I've been prepping for my doctoral Greek exam, which includes
>questions like "What kind of genitive appears in the construction?",
>or so I'm told. In reading through grammars I have, I'm confronted with
>multiple, disparrate systems of identification, and I'm unsure as to which
>one to use, i.e., which one is more likely to be recognized as
>"standard" or at least known to most NT scholars. On the one hand,,
>there's a pretty minimalist set of choices discussed in Porter's Idiom
>book. In the middle I think is Dana and Mantey, which I first leraned
>this stuff from, and then on the other end it seems, though I've only
>owned it about a day, is Brooks and Winbery which seems to mzke many fine
>distinctions about what a given case grammaticalizes.
>I'm certainly not ty
>rying to critique the latter. I did after all buy it on purpose.
>Still, I don't know which of these systems or perhaps that of BDF or whoemever
>to use. I'd hate to miss a question by referring to a dative of advantage
>if the
>examiner has never heard of that.
>
>Thanks in advance.

Don't worry, Ken. If your examiners are competent, they can deal with
variant terminology, whether you call a conditinal sentence a teykpe 1, a
determined- fulfilled, or a present simple condition. They will know more
than one set of grammatical terms, even though they will have their own
preference.

Come to think of it, why don't you simply ask your advisor or examining
committee whose terminology they prefer? And list the grammar you are
following in the exam itself.

==============

By the way, there is no substitute for the large LSJ for the LXX, though
you can do a lot with the intermediate LS.

Peace,

Edgar Krentz, New Testament
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago
1100 East 55th Street
Chicago, IL 60615
Tel.: 312-256-0752; (H) 312-947-8105



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:37:36 EDT