Sorry to be responding to the same post by Stephen Hughes three times (once actually to George Somsel), but there were three different things to say here, one about the nature and apparent intent of Wallace's GGBB, one about SH's term, "deponent actives," and now about Wallace's category of dative-case forms, "dative of cause".Stephen Hughes wrote:Thank you, Bill, for requoting that from Wallace. - It's appreciated because I don't have access to my copy at present. I have taken the liberty to reformat, and clip and add bits from and to your quotation to show more clearly the point that ALL of the verbs that the Dative of Cause (???only???) goes with are mediopassive in form. That would perhaps clearly place it among the voice-level dependent syntactic constructions, rather than a word-level one.wcombs wrote:→ 6. Dative of Cause [because of]
...
d. Illustrations
- Luke 15:17 λιμῷ ... ἀπόλλυμαι; -- I am perishing ... because of a famine
- Rom 4:20 οὐ διεκρίθη τῇ ἀπιστίᾳ -- he did not waver because of unbelief
- Gal 6:12 ἵνα τῷ σταυρῷ ... μὴ διώκωνται -- that they might not be persecuted because of the cross
- Phil 1:14 ... πεποιθότας τοῖς δεσμοῖς μου -- having become confident ... because of my bonds
...- Rom 11:30-32 [ἠλεήθητε τῇ τούτων ἀπειθείᾳ -- you have obtained hope because of their disobedience]
- 2 Cor 2:7 [μήπως τῇ περισσοτέρᾳ λύπῃ καταποθῇ ὁ τοιοῦτος -- so that such a person would not be swallowed up because of excessive sorrow]
- Eph 2:8 [quoted from above] τῇ ... χάριτί ἐστε σεσῳσμένοι διὰ πίστεως ... τῇ χάριτι is the cause of our salvation ;
- 1 Pet 4:12 [μὴ ξενίζεσθε τῇ ... πυρώσει -- don’t be astonished because of the fiery trial]
Does anyone know of a readily available list of "deponent actives" (is that the term for words like πάσχειν discussed earlier?) that could be worked through to further test how this construction interacts with the verb.
As Barry noted earlier, these datives have traditionally been termed "instrumental datives" or "datives of means". However, a dative is used with passive verbs, especially in the perfect passive, sometimes in the aorist passive, to indicate the agent (when otherwise we would expect ὑπὸ + genitive). My thinking is that all these really are common usages of a dative that might just most simply be called "instrumental dative" -- marking or "grammaticalizing" a factor involved in an action. I'm wondering whether there is any real need for subcategories of the instrumental dative: "agent with a passive verb", "means", "cause"? I can see that the datives in the list cited above cannot rightly be called "agents" (although SH used that terms earlier in this thread), but even though the context in the cited passages does involve "passive" or "subject-affected" verbs, is the usage in these passages really anything other than simple "instrumental dative"?