[b-greek] Re: Cases and Prepositions

From: c stirling bartholomew (cc.constantine@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Sun Jul 22 2001 - 16:58:00 EDT


on 7/22/01 12:35 PM, Clwinbery@aol.com wrote:

> Clay I would like to suppose that you are dealing with a second semester
> Greek class about learning to translate and 2 Corinthians 7:15 has been
> assigned to study in this respect. Focus on THN PANTWN hUMWN hUPAKOHN.
> Obviously PANTWN hUMWN is adnomial, it follows the article and precedes the
> noun which is head of this noun phrase. What would you tell tham that in this
> context PANTWN hUMWN adds to hUPAKOHN? How would you describe what it does?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Carlton Winbery
> Louisiana College

Thanks Carlton,

According to *Brooks & Winbery (Syntax of NT Greek, 1979, page 14) PANTWN
hUMWN is a subjective genitive. Wallace (GGBB p114) agrees and calls it a
clear case of a subjective genitive.

How would I sort this out?

First of all I would ask that we keep the issues of lexical semantics and
the syntactic function of the case form distinct. The genitive case form of
PANTWN hUMWN provides a syntactic structural link to THN hUPAKOHN. In
other words the case tells us that THN hUPAKOHN is limited by PANTWN hUMWN.
That IMHO, is the extent of the function of the case.

Now we move on to lexical semantics. The noun THN hUPAKOHN is what is
commonly called an action noun. When an action noun is limited by a genitive
constituent it is popular among Greek grammarians to see it as a "deep
structure" verb clause where the genitive serves either as the subject or
the object of that deep structure clause. This is OK with me if you want to
do things that way. However this issue is raised by the lexical semantics of
the noun THN hUPAKOHN as an action verb collocated with PANTWN hUMWN. It is
a problem raised by the lexical properties of these two constituents when
the are linked together by the case form. It is not, IMHO, a function of the
genitive case. (The obvious rebuttal here would be, "Why don' t we seen the
accusative doing the same thing?").

Having said all this, I will admit that in a recent bit of writing on this
topic I did adopt a category called "genitives qualifying action verbs."
This category is a hybrid because it mixes the lexical semantic properties
of the the action verb and the qualifying substantive with the structural
properties of the genitive case. It is this sort of hybrid that, IMHO,
causes confusion.

As for a second semester Greek class, I cannot help you. Never been there.

Thanks for the question,

Clay


--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062

* Brooks & Winbery is probably the clearest and least confusing of the
intermediate grammars using the traditional approach. The presentation is
very lean and the language model they use is followed very consistently.


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