Primary and secondary grammar classes teach that a transitive clause is a clause with an object: Rachel shattered […]
Category Archive: Syntax
My audience didn’t do a particularly good job participating in the beginning quiz. Next time I’ll need to find some additional incentives.
Continuing on with my summary of the papers presented at SEBTS’s Linguistics and New Testament Greek Conference, April […]
But there’s a far simpler explanation of the data that does not need Porter’s overwrought prominence model.
Telicity tests and syntactic diagnostics are surprisingly relevant for understanding the semantics of the Ancient Greek perfect.
Happy International Septuagint Day everyone!
Tense and aspect are central for narrative text. The perfective and imperfective aspect, particularly, are essential for how an author builds a narrative structure and signals to the reader the flow of the story.
With the great success from publication the The Greek Verb Revisited: A Fresh Approach for Biblical Exegesis now a couple years behind us and the great labor of writing, editing, rewriting and more editing all, but happy distant memory, it seems worthwhile to share the conclusion to the article I contributed to the volume.
I examined the question of Greek prohibitions and the much argued about expressions: stop doing X (imperfective aspect) and do not start X (perfective aspect). Traditionally these expressions are wholly associated their respective aspect verb form as motivation for their meanings, going back to journal articles from over 100 years ago. In my article, I put forward an alternative approach, suggesting that not also aspect, but also the nature of the negation itself plays a role in the how and why of these expressions.
So without further ado, enjoy:
Languages often have multiple means of communicating the same thing. Lexical inventories overlap; grammatical forms might share related functions.
What reasons are there for a Greek speaker to use a reflexive pronoun with a verb rather than the middle voice?
