Re: Qualitative and Indefinite (grandmothers, eggs & questions of salience etc)

lakr (lakr@netcom.com)
Sun, 7 Sep 1997 15:15:01 -0700 (PDT)

>For folks who might be wondering about the relevance of this for biblical
>Greek, I'd point them to the workbook of Stephen Levinsohn of SIL, _Discourse
>Features of New Testament Greek_ (Dallas: SIL, 1992) which has an interesting
>chapter on the article, focussing particularly on its significance with respect
>to proper nouns and participant reference/status in NT narratives. Also
>interesting is his suggestion that, in certain cases, non-articular
>substantives (which are in context clearly definite) are being marked out as
>salient by the omission of the article.
>
> John Kendall
> Cardiff
> Wales

John,

I thought this sounded familiar and found in my files an article in
FILOGOGIA NEOTESTAMENTARIA (Vol. V-Mayo,1992) "The use of the definite
article before names of people in the Greek text of Acts with particular
reference to Codex Bezae". by Jenny Heimerdinger and Stephen Levinsohn.

In this article he says on page 35 "The rules which are defined in this
study strictly apply at this stage only to the use of the definite
article before names of persons in the passages examined in Acts. It
should be possible, however, to go on from this analysis and check the
results in the rest of the book, as well as test tham on the other
New Testament narritives."

I in fact started to do this myself after reading his article. However,
if he has broadened his research techniques to include as you say above
'non-articular substantives' which I presume you mean includes those
which are not proper names I would be very interested in reading more
about it. Do you know if this is the case ?

Sincerely,
Larry Kruper