section 17 wrote:περὶ δούλων μοι, ἔφη ὁ Σωκράτης, ἐπιχειρεῖς, ὦ Κριτόβουλε, διαλέγεσθαι;
Wes Wood wrote:διαλέγεσθαι: This word likely means “to have a conversation” or “ to argue” here. It may take a dative of person.
Stephen Hughes wrote:Are you unsure yourself?
I am unsure if it always takes a dative.
I'm still not sure what was being asked here exactly. διαλέγεσθαι is
usually used with the dative of the person whom the speaker wants to make their point to. You are asking about one particular part of the syntactic structure of one particular verb. We could do that till the cows came home, and still perhaps not get a feel for the syntax. A more apposite question is does διαλέγεσθαι always take such and such a syntactic structure? Case is one part of that.
The verbs διαλέγεσθαι (and ὁμιλεῖν) takes the basic syntactic structure [+dative / of the person to whom the point is trying to be made +περί +gen of the thing being discussed], while συζητεῖν takes a similar structure, except that the thing they reason about is in the accusative. When you are processing language, you have a set of structures and which you recognise and then associate verbs with those structures. So, first see the structure then decode the components. To take that a little further, the first element heard or seen is often a noun or pronoun, the case of which is the first hint as to which structure is coming up.
You could look at the NT verses if you want to see the pattern of usage of διαλέγεσθαι from context Mark 9:34, Acts 17:2, Acts 17:17, Acts 18:4, Acts 18:19, Acts 19:8, Acts 19:9, Acts 20:7, Acts 20:9, Acts 24:12, Acts 24:25, Hebrews 12:5, Jude 1:9 or you could look in a dictionary to find them listed.