> To rest my weary brain from Ephesians, I've started reading Mark (*much*
> easier!), and I ran into an accusative which surprised me:
>
> Mark 1:19 (GNT) Kai probas oligon eiden Iakwbon ton tou Zebedaiou kai
> Iwannhn ton adelfon autou kai *autous* en tw ploiw katartizontas ta diktua
>
> I remember a discussion of attraction of the pronoun earlier - is that what
> I'm looking at here?
No, not really--this is repetition of the immediately preceding objects of
EIDEN (IAKWBON ... KAI IWANNHN) followed by an emphatic AUTOUS emphasized
further by an adverbial KAI: " ... saw James ... & John, them also in the
boat ..." I would undestand this KAI AUTOUS as clarifying that Jesus
encountered James and John on the coastline and on a boat just as he had
previously encountered Simon and Andrew. By this accounting, AUTOUS is in
apposition to the proper noun objects.
An alternative way of reading it is to take AUTOUS as the subject of the
participle KATARTIZONTAS; since a verb o perception takes indirect
discourse with a participle rather than with an infinitive you can
understand this as " ... saw James ... & John and that they were mending
... "
There's little difference in the meaning resultant from these two
different analyses, but the constructions are different. In #1 above
AUTOUS is appositional to the proper nouns, while in #2 it is the
accusative subject of the participle functioning as the predicate in an
indirect discourse construction with a verb of perception.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/