From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun May 28 2000 - 09:54:08 EDT
At 6:09 PM -0400 5/27/00, yochanan bitan wrote:
>Clay egrapse:
>>Looking at the two texts I
>>have quoted above they seem to have some similarity to the examples Dik
>uses
>>to show how the semantic Recipient can function as a subject. However I
>find
>>myself unwilling to accept the idea of a constituent in the dative case as
>a
>>subject
>
>Good intuition, Clay.
>I would agree that datives are NOT syntactic subjects. Period.
>Dik would agree. Dik calls Subject a 'syntactic' function not a semantic
>'role'. So, even if his definition sounds 'semantic', it is manifested and
>defined 'syntactically' within each language.
Example: Rev 8:2 KAI EIDON TOUS hEPTA AGGELOUS hOI ENWPION TOU QEOU
hESTHKASIN, KAI EDOQHSAN AUTOIS hEPTA SALPIGGES. In English perhaps we
would normally convert that last clause as "They were given seven
trumpets"--that is, English can make a recipient the syntactic subject and
treat what is the subject in the Greek sentence as a so-called "received
object" of the passive verb (the notion of the "received object" evidently
being based upon the view that the default form of the clause was active
and the object was originally a direct object).
>As to the generic, cross-linguistic question, 'what is a subject', please
>don't raise it on this list. Answers depend on whether someone is thinking
>pragmatically 'about topics', semantically 'about agents', syntactically
>'about subjects', or within another linguistic system that collapses these
>three parameters into two or one.
I would suggest, Clay, that as a slinger of Molotov cocktails and erstwhile
impugner of THEORIES now playing like a child in a laboratory full of
glassware and volatile liquids, might do better to find yourself a
Linguistics e-list to shake up, or at least confine your linguistic
inquiries to such as have clear and obvious relevance to our understanding
of Koine Greek.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad@ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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