From: Paul S. Dixon (dixonps@juno.com)
Date: Thu Jan 01 1998 - 02:00:14 EST
On Wed, 31 Dec 1997 20:24:30 -0500 Jonathan Robie <jonathan@texcel.no>
writes:
>At 04:10 PM 12/31/97 -0800, Dale M. Wheeler wrote:
>>At 06:17 PM 12/31/97 -0500, Jonathan Robie wrote:
<snip>
Dale says:
>>My personal view on John 1:1c
>>is that QEOS is anathrous because its a predicate, non-convertible
>>proposition; its qualitative (or definite...but I don't think here)
because
>>its precopulative (I'm not attempting to turn Colwell around here, ie.,
>>QEOS is put before the verb because John intends it to be understood
>>a certain way).
>
Jonathan responds:
>This is essentially in agreement with Paul Dixon's view, I believe -
wasn't
>he the person who came up with the precopulative distinction? I'm still
>agnostic as to whether precopulative position makes a difference. I'm
>still slogging my way through the examples...
>
Actually, it was Colwell who made the initial distinction between the
precopulative and post-copulative occurrences. He, of course, considered
only definite precopulative and post-copulative predicate nominatives and
affirmed the probability of articularity of such. I considered all the
occurrences of the anarthrous predicate nominative in John's Gospel and
found in 50 of 53 occurrences of the precopulative construct the
significance was qualitativeness, and qualitativeness in 13 of 19
post-copulative constructs.
I do agree with Wheeler and Wallace that "most abstract nouns will be
qualitative" (Wallace, p. 244) by nature, that is, by the lexical nature
of the words themselves. Yet, as Wallace cites ATR, "no vital difference
was felt between articular and anarthrous abstract nouns" (p. 249).
Wallace's list of "10 constructions in which a noun may be definite
though anarthrous," is worth checking out. (p. 249).
Paul Dixon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:38:44 EDT