Eeli and Barry, thanks for the involvement with this thread. When I said "background information for the sake of background information", the background information provided was supposed to be related to to some aspect of the event just described. But the nature of the background-foreground relatedness is inferred from the context. I guess that the usual notion of "explanation" is weaker than the notion of "reason/cause", but still too strong to cover all the usages of γαρ. Whenever I meet γαρ, I find myself trying to find some logical connection, even the one not expressed or not easily implied. Perhaps this is a wrong presupposition learned from the traditional grammar. In this particular case, the logical connection that she was old enough to walkEeli Kaikkonen wrote:Giving background information only for the sake of giving background information doesn't sound very sound
. If it's background for something it's not logical to say it's "just for the sake of background" without any further explanation. It's like saying "she walked around, for some people had laughed at Jesus". The latter part is background just for the sake of background. But it's not logical. There must be a natural connection between the two parts. That's the idea of γαρ. If there's no logical connection the background information can be given in some other way, for example "there was a girl, twelve years old, who...".
I have another proposal for the logical connection: the girl was old enough to walk. Otherwise the reader could take her ability to walk as a miracle about which the people "were completely astonished".
might have been in the mind of the author. But the author might have communicated her age simply as a further background detail about her, in order to picture the situation more concretely. Yes, there is another way to say this, for example "there was a girl, twelve years old, who...". But for Mark, who loves to use short sentences side by side, the GAR clause seems to be a good way to express an afterthought. But, surely my proposal needs a lot of testing, but I think it is interesting.
Moon Jung