Jonathan Robie wrote: ↑December 26th, 2021, 6:06 pm
. . . Luke 2:48 Antoniades 1904
καὶ ἰδόντες αὐτὸν ἐξεπλάγησαν, καὶ πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡ μήτηρ αὐτοῦ εἶπε· τέκνον, τί ἐποίησας ἡμῖν οὕτως;
. . . After all, she's looking at him when she speaks, why emphasize the fact that it's him that she is speaking to? In other passages where πρὸς αὐτὸν or πρὸς αὐτοὺς occurs before εἶπεν, it often has a sense like "it was to them that he was speaking", as in Mark 12:12:
Καὶ ἐζήτουν αὐτὸν κρατῆσαι, καὶ ἐφοβήθησαν τὸν ὄχλον, ἔγνωσαν γὰρ ὅτι πρὸς αὐτοὺς τὴν παραβολὴν εἶπεν
But that's not what's happening here. What is?
First, I think I agree with what Stephen said, however, it may help to look from another angle.
How does one read this on the fly, or at a Tuesday night gathering with the audience sipping their mulled wine?
In Luke 2.48 there are two fronted constituents "to him" and "his mother". These are actually in the most common specialized orders where the first fronted item provides a contextualization (often called topicalization) and the second fronted item provides the marked salient information, the focus, or "emphasis" to use your words. In other words "mother" is the grammatically marked focus, not "him". Fronted structures typically build in a direction from contextualization to focus.
However, Greek allows the opposite order, somewhat rarely. Mark 12:12 shows a fronted Focus (πρὸς αὐτούς probably retaining its high tone as a Focal constituent, followed by a contextualizing "the parable he said" instead of a more expected default order "he said the parable."
In real life these would probably have been distinguished by intonation. Mark 12.12 would have concluded with a non-focal, default accent παραβολὴν [low tone eta, which fits normal accent rules, though possibly even demoting/suppressing the accent on εἶπεν], while Luke 2.48 would have suppressed the natural high tone on αὐτὸν according to normal accent rules, but may have had a slightly elevated high tone on μήτηρ.