From: Paul S. Dixon (dixonps@juno.com)
Date: Tue Jan 06 1998 - 12:57:54 EST
On Mon, 05 Jan 1998 20:33:19 -0500 Jonathan Robie <jonathan@texcel.no>
writes:
>At 07:47 PM 1/5/98 EST, Paul S. Dixon wrote:
>
>>Well, you certainly get no argument here. But, hardly anybody
>>I know of these days is arguing that QEOS in Jn 1:1c is definite.
>>Colwell and others subsequently did argue that, but their
>>argumentation was logically fallacious. Most NT scholars today
>>seem to be taking QEOS in 1:1c qualitatively, and rightly so. The
>>anarthrous precopulative predicate nominative in John is almost
>>always qualitative.
>
>Paul, you are certainly better informed on this than I am - after all,
you
>wrote a thesis which has been quoted in Wallace's popular intermediate
>grammar, and seems to have influenced the treatment in Mounce's popular
>elementary grammar. In fact, I think it is fair to say that your
>thesis has been very influential in pushing the qualitative
interpretation in
>these kinds of constructions.
I am very grateful it has been so well received.
>I don't think that I agree that "hardly anybody" would argue that John
1:1c
>is definite these days; in private email, I have found that several
>scholars I respect on this list seem to think that it is quite likely
>definite, but that this can not be proved on grammatical grounds. This
>also seems to be the position of Robertson and Smyth, two old grammars
>whose judgement I respect.
Those who see definiteness in 1:1c probably do so in conjunction with the
stress on qualitativeness, as many are seeing double nuancing these days.
The
question, however, relates to what is being stressed.
>For now, I've decided to leave "qualitative" out of my online grammar.
>Fortunately, it is just a bunch of web pages, which I can change at
>any time. I need to know more before I can do that. Astute readers will
>note that I have also left myself some wiggle room in some of the
>explanations ;->
>
>I'm somewhat agnostic about the question. My internal systematic
>grammar still does not have a category for "qualitative", and the
linguists
>I've asked do not use it as a technical term or know how to test for it.
Is
>the term "qualitative" ever used for anything other than anarthrous
>precopulative nominative predicate nouns? Does this exist as a usage
>for nouns in other languages? The term "definite" does exist in the
>linguistics literature, and there is discussion of how to test for it.
Do
>classical Greek scholars talk about "qualitative" uses of anarthrous
>precopulative nominative predicate nouns? (I do not know the answer to
that >last question.) I guess the question I am asking is this: is this a
>grammatical category that came to be because of John 1:1c?
>
>There do seem to be a number of constructions of this form that could
>plausibly be interpreted as qualitative; this is especially true in the
>gospel of John, where most of these constructions could plausibly be
>interpreted as qualitative. However, some other instances of the same
>construction seem to be definite. This implies to me that it may not
>be the construction itself, but the sense of what is being said in some
of
>these constructions, that seems to promote a qualitative interpretation.
>
I wish I had more time for this. Sorry. Nevertheless, the qualitative
nuance is nothing new, certainly nothing created by me. Two grammars I
just checked, BDF (Blass-DeBrunner-Funk) and ATR, 1961 and 1934
respectively, discuss qualitative nouns (BDF - p. 132, paragraph 252;
ATR, p. 794). Gotta go.
Paul Dixon
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