>>Personally, I think the whole matter of which noun is the grammatical
>>subject is of little relevance to the translation issue. What is much more
>>important is that the the article seems to show which noun should NOT be
>>taken as the logical predicate.
>
At 2:26 AM -0400 9/5/97, Jonathan Robie responded:
>Phrasing the rule this way means that Carl's example MEGA BIBLION MEGA KAKON
>is not a counterexample.
>
>I wrote:
>>This approach is consistent with the view that the ABSENCE of the article
>>is often a marker of salience--a discourse issue rather than a strictly
>>syntactic one.
And Jonathan responded:
>
>Does this view say that dropping the article is a way of emphasizing the
>substantive? Sure sounds simpler than Colwell's rule ;->
It doesn't exactly mean that. Salience is not equivalent to emphasis. It
includes other issues such as the first mention of a character in a
narrative text (which may be quite unemphatic) as well as emphasis.
I am glad to answer this question, but I do not want to get a theoretical
discussion of salience started on the list (unless, of course, we can find
a way to tie it directly to specific Greek texts).
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Micheal W. Palmer mwpalmer@earthlink.net
Religion & Philosophy
Meredith College
Visit the Greek Language and Linguistics Gateway at
http://home.earthlink.net/~mwpalmer/
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