Category Archive: Language

Reflections on prepositions in grammars and lexicons

Rachel and I just submitted our manuscript of Greek prepositions in the New Testament: A Cognitive-Functional Description, 2nd edition!

We all love a good grammar or dictionary! If you work in Biblical or Postclassical Greek, you should absolutely have a copy of BDAG and probably a copy of von Siebenthal (2019) or Whitacre (2021), too! Still, there’s so much more to said about prepositions in this works!

We want readers to have a full picture of how our work on prepositions relates to standard teaching and reference works that are more familiar to you.

A brief note on antelope, gazelle, & deer

Nearly all major English translations in Acts 9:36 completely fail to communicate what the author of Acts is trying to do here: tell his readers that the name ‘Tabitha’ is a Aramaic word (טַבְיְתָא) that means ‘gazelle’. Luke’s audiences doesn’t want to know that two names correspond in an unknown way. Luke’s audience wants to know the meaning of Tabitha…

The preposition περί and cultural category structures

There are plenty of abstract uses of the preposition περί—the most comment is TOPIC with verbs of thought and communication. But with many other non-communication situations, the preposition περί often functions to express category structures. It’s spatial sense “Location Around” still provides the motivating image schema (CENTER-PERIPHERY), but reconstrued metaphorically as a point in conceptual space that affects actions or circumstances in its proximity around it.

“Greek Prohibitions” in The Greek Verb Revisited

I recently realized that I never uploaded the pdf from my chapter, “Greek Prohibitions,” in The Greek Verb Revisited anywhere online. My conference slides have been available online for quite some time: Greek Prohibitions Conference Slides, but not the final chapter. That situation has now been rectified and I’ve included the book’s front matter for easier citations, should anyone so choose to do so.