This year saw an enormous amount of overlap across the various language-oriented sessions at SBL/AAR and Rachel and I want as many people to be able to benefit from our research as possible, particularly those outside the traditional academy and work in Bible translation. To that end, we’ve recorded our paper: SBL 2023: Constructions and the Source-Path-Goal Schema. If all goes well in the editing, we will have a version of it uploaded to YouTube some time next week.

In the meantime, you all know that Koine-Greek.com is a place for talking about language. Let’s talk about language.

Abstract: Constructions and the Source-Path-Goal Schema

The SOURCE-PATH-GOAL image schema constitutes a common meaning structure across languages that is grounded in our shared embodied human experience (Lakoff 1987, Hampe and Grady 2005). In Ancient Greek, its formal realization occurs as grammatical constructions. We document how the image schema’s realization in the language forms a small family of constructions expressed via prepositions and how the meaning of these prepositional constructions realize semantics across different conceptual domains (Croft and Cruse 2004, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2010). Some more basic realizations including the primary spatial domain (Luraghi 2003): Ἄγουσιν οὖν τὸν Ἰησοῦν ἀπὸ τοῦ Καϊάφα εἰς τὸ πραιτώριον (‘they brought Jesus from Caipha to the governor’s residence’, Jn 18:28), the temporal domain: Ἀπογράφονται δὲ αὐτοὺς ἀπὸ πέμπτης καὶ εἰκάδος τοῦ Παχὼν ἕως τῆς τετάρτης τοῦ Ἐπιφί (‘They registered them from the twenty-fifth day of the month of Pachon until the fourth of Epeiph’, 3 Macc 6:38), origin/class: καὶ συνέδραμον πάντες ἀπὸ μικροῦ ἕως μεγάλου αὐτῶν, ὅτι παράδοξον ἦν αὐτοῖς τοῦ ἐλθεῖν αὐτήν (‘And they all ran out together from the least to the greatest’, Judith 13:13). We propose that landmark-types play a significant role in the meaning of the whole in a manner that is, while comprehensible, also semantically noncompositional (à la constructions) (Goldberg 1985, Brenda and Mazurkiewicz-Sokołowska 2022). We conclude with discussion of traditionally difficult abstract instances of the schema and construction such as δικαιοσύνη γὰρ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ ἀποκαλύπτεται ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν (‘For the righteousness of God is revealed in him from faith to faith’, Roman 1:7).