Is "to verb" a neologism? I've never seen it before; apparently it's only
used transitively. I don't much like the practice of turning nouns into
verbs, but I guess it has a venerable enough history (General Haig did draw
some hostile fire for doing it so regularly, but fought back with the
wonderful title of his book, _Caveat That!_, whereby he turned what was
originally a Latin subjunctive verb that had become an English noun into an
English imperative verb).
For my part (EMOI or IMHO!), a preliminary note that these equivalencies,
though they are hopefully helpful(!), should be understood to be
oversimplications.
Furthermore, it seems to me that (EMOI or IMHO!) it would be more
consistent with what you've done with the other categories to put down as a
listing for "pure" or "true" dative, the two prepositional phases: "to" X,
"for" X. If you did that you could eliminate the central term "Indirect
object," and your prepositional phrases would then automatically include
datives of possession and the whole general categories of dative of
reference (such as EMOI as "ethical" or "sentence" dative). For Locative
dative, you might add a second prepositional phrase: "at" X.
Personally I'm increasingly leery of "object" as a viable syntactical term
and am coming to prefer "complement" for the word used to complete the
sense of a verb; I do think it makes sense to speak of a "direct
complement" and an "indirect complement." However, "direct object" and
"indirect object" are so deeply rooted in traditional grammar that they
cannot be dislodged very easily; English-speaking novices in Koine Greek or
in any other language who know nothing else about English grammar probably
know what a "direct object" and an "indirect object" are supposed to be.
Which raises an interesting little methodological question (this may be a
can of worms!): since you really cannot go very far in teaching a "target"
language without teaching something about the structural differences
between the "native" and the "target" language, just how deep into a
linguistic theory do you (I'm using the second person generically here)
want to go with the learners? They do need to be clear on how you're using
your terminology (and the use of "verb" as a verb could itself be
confusing), and the farther you go the more you'll realize that you're
dependent for your power to explain upon a metalanguage of grammatical
reference and structure to which both teacher and learner must be privy.
For my part (EMOI ...), this metalanguage is sufficiently important that I
like to be up front about it and raise the issue close to the start of a
beginners' course, and I notice that Ward Powers (whose textbook I've just
received through his kindness) does this very nicely at the outset. At any
rate, if you don't do it right at the outset, you're going to have to do it
as soon as you come to a Greek grammatical structure that isn't comparable
to the English way of communicating the same idea. So perhaps this
methodological question is an unavoidable part of the pedagogical
enterprise of teaching a language.
I didn't really mean to carry on at length about this reservation of mine
which is not so immediately relevant to the question Jonathan has raised
about this pattern of presentation, but the more I think about it, the more
inclined I am to think it's something that needs to be thought through by
any teacher of a language at some point--the sooner, the better.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/