Re: Another Dative Question
Carl William Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Fri, 21 Nov 1997 10:41:46 -0600 (CST)
On Fri, 21 Nov 1997 CWestf5155@aol.com wrote:
>
> But all seriousness aside, your example raised further questions for me.
> Does the Ethical Dative share some kind of semantic domain with the Dative
> of Reference as well as the Dative of Advantage (Dativus commodi)? Or do
> you disagree with Wallace that in Phil 1:21 (EMOI GAR TO ZHN XRISTOS) could
> be an ethical dative?
As I suggested yesterday, what's called an "ethical dative" or earlier
even an "ethic" dative (for reasons I've never understood) might better be
called a "sentence dative," and I'd say that this IS INDEED a dative of
reference with the qualification that it modifies the entire sentence, not
just the subject or predicate or a part of one or the other; it means that
the proposition stated in the sentence is of particular relevance to the
person indicated by the dative.
That may very well seem repetitive of what we've said before, but I'm
hoping it may be something of a clarification.
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/