From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 14:34:07 EST
At 2:15 PM -0500 12/20/99, Ilvgrammta@aol.com wrote:
>Dear B-Greekers,
>
>1 John 1:5 reads:
>
>hO HN AP' ARXHS hO AKHKOAMEN hO hEWRAKAMEN TOIS OFQALMOIS hHMWN hO EQEASAMEQA
>KAI hAI XEIRES hHMWN EYHLAFHSAN PERI TOU LOGOU THS ZWHS.
>
>In his _First John Reader_ S.M. Baugh writes that THS ZWHS is a "genitive of
>connection." (where the word in the genitive highlights the subject matter of
>discourse. In this case, the "word of life.")
>
>What is a genitive of connection? Is this another category formulated to
>classify and tag syntactical functions? I've looked in other grammars and
>have yet to find a "genitive of connection." Maybe I've been looking in the
>wrong places, but I would love to know more about this subject.
I'm almost glad you've asked this question, Edgar. Of course I've never
heard of the term either, but if I were writing my own grammar (and it's a
LOT easier to criticize others who attempt it), I rather think that I might
use that term in preference to what I've learned to call the
"Pertinentive"--the standard usage of the genitive to relate any one noun
to any other;it's a structural designation and doesn't have a defined
semantic function at all, which means it is commonly used adjectivally; I
would distinguish it (as I gather some others would not) from an ablatival
genitive where separation is fundamental to a semantic function and from a
partitive genitive, where there's a semantic function also. I don't think
that calling ZWHS a "genitive of connection" tells us a thing about what
the relationship between ZWH and LOGOS actually is, only that ZWH depends
upon LOGOS and further distinguishes LOGOS as would any sort of descriptive
or delimiting adjective or adjectival phrase.
--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
--- B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-329W@franklin.oit.unc.edu To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:40:50 EDT