From: Iver Larsen (alice-iver_larsen@wycliffe.org)
Date: Wed Jan 17 2001 - 05:29:24 EST
In a reply to Mark Wilson Carl wrote among other things:
>
> (1) PAS is one of those "demonstrative" adjectives that is ALWAYS used in
> the predicative position with respect to article and noun.
>
I am not sure what "predicative position" means, but I assume it means that when
PAS modifies a nominal construction it ALWAYS precedes it. If that assumption is
wrong, the following comments may not be speaking to the point. If the
assumption is right, then we need to clarify the issue.
Although PAS normally precedes the noun it modifies, there are 23 instances in
the NT where it follows. For those who want to look them up, I am listing them
at the end of the message.
We are dealing here with both inherent and positional prominence/emphasis.
Certain lexical items are prominent simply by the fact that they occur. This I
call inherent prominence. For instance, I could say "A child was screaming" or
"The children were screaming." I could also say "One child was screaming" or
"All the children were screaming." The mere mentioning of "one" and "all" marks
the idea it refers to as prominent. In English, such words tend to be stressed
to show the prominence.
In Greek, the normal, unmarked, expected order of a noun + modifier is that the
modifier follows the noun (opposite of English order.) However, if the author
wants to put a relatively greater prominence on the modifier than the noun, then
the modifier is moved forward to precede the noun.
In the case of a few modifiers which are inherently prominent, the normal,
unmarked, expected order is modifier+noun. That is why words like PAS, POLUS,
hOLOS and hEIS precede the nouns they modify, unless they are markedly
downgraded in prominence. If these words follow the noun, it means that the noun
itself has relatively greater prominence than the modifier, and this is an
important aspect to take into account.
To go back to the English example. We can do some of the things with stress what
Greek does with word order. If I say "All the CHILDREN were screaming" I am
contrasting the children to some other people who were not screaming, and the
word "all" is then made relatively less prominent. To show that in Greek, one
would need to say PAIDES PANTES, and not PANTES PAIDES. However if there is no
particular stress on children, the default order in Greek for "all the children"
would be PANTES PAIDES.
Now the list for PAS following the noun it modifies (to save you firing up
GRAMCORD):
Matt 9:35, 10:30, 26:56, Mark 1:5, Luke 21:24, John 5:22,
Acts 2:14, 4:29, 8:40, 16:26, 27:20
Rom 3:8, 12:4, 16:16
1 Cor 7:17, 13:2 (note the different orders in the various PAS constructions),
15:7, 16:20
Eph 5:8, 1 Th 5:26, 2 Ti 4:21, 2 Pet 1:5, Rev 13:12
Iver Larsen
Kolding, Denmark
alice-iver_larsen@wycliffe.org
---
B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [jwrobie@mindspring.com]
To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-327Q@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 - 15:36:47 EDT