Abstract
In the Greek New Testament, relative sentences that are introduced by relative pronouns alone, apart from the adverbial uses, are the most frequent subordinate sentence type. The research reported on in this paper aimed to investigate and describe a number of syntactic features of relative constructions in the Greek New Testament, taking account, among others, of some typological parameters that have been developed in the general linguistics literature for these constructions. The results indicate that relative constructions in the Greek New Testament have a variety of features, all of which have counterparts in some modern (or other ancient) languages, despite the differences. The relative sentence in the Greek New Testament is mostly postnominal, and the relative pronoun-type is used in those cases for encoding the role of the coreferential element in the relative sentence. Phrases expressing a variety of syntactic functions in a sentence (e.g. subject, direct object, etc.) are accessible to relativisation, that is, they can be represented by relative pronouns. Nominal elements serve mostly as antecedents of relative sentences, although sentences appear in that function as well. A variety of syntactic types of relative sentences can be distinguished, including the prenominal participial, postnominal finite/participial, circumnominal, free relative, adverbial, prejoined, postjoined, sentential and conjoined types. These can be linked in a systematic way to the four functions of relative sentences in the New Testament, i.e. identifying, appositive, adverbial and continuative. Relative sentences also play a role in communicative strategies. Prejoined relative sentences, for example, are most suitable for exposition and theme-building, especially in the correlative diptych construction. Keywords : Relative sentence, relative construction, syntax, Hellenistic Greek, New Testament
Highlights
The relative construction (RC), which could be defined simplistically as consisting of an antecedent and a relative sentence (RS), is a pervasive phenomenon in the languages of the world
In the Greek New Testament (NT), for example, RSs introduced by the relative pronoun (RP) alone, apart from the adverbial uses, are the most frequent subordinate sentence (Robertson 1919: 954)
With regard to encoding the role of the coreferential element in the RS, NT Greek uses the RP-type of encoding, which is commonly found in European languages such as Russian, French, German, the Northern Italian dialects, etc
Summary
RCs in NT (and Classical) Greek commonly consist of an overt antecedent, followed by an RS. The gender and number features of the RP are determined in a few instances by the constructio ad sensum (“construction according to sense”), which was a very widespread feature of Greek from early times (Blass and Debrunner [1913] 1967: 74). The case of the RP is assimilated to that of the head-N (or another nominalised element) by means of progressive assimilation, as in 2 Cor. 10:8b.: περὶ τῆς ἐξουσίας ἡμῶν ἧς ἔδωκεν ὁ κύριος εἰς οἰκοδομὴν (“with regard to our authority which the Lord gave for building up”). The RP ἧς (“which”), which would usually be in the accusative case as direct object of ἔδωκεν (“he gave”), is here in the genitive case, since it is assimilated by the case of the head-N ἐξουσίας (“authority”). The subject and direct object in a sentence such as He/both or her/everyone would each be analysed as a DP (= Determiner Phrase) taking he/both or her/everyone as its head, and lacking an NP. 21 See section 2.4
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