Passive verbs + instrumental datives without ἐν

cwconrad
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Re: Passive verbs + instrumental datives without ἐν

Post by cwconrad »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
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]
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.

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.
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".

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"?
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
Stephen Hughes
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Re: Passive verbs + instrumental datives without ἐν

Post by Stephen Hughes »

cwconrad wrote:
Stephen Hughes wrote:
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]
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.

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.
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".

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"?
"Because" being the logical answer to "why?" and "why?" being a fossilised instrumental form from Old English, "because of" is in effect assumption of equivalence between the cases of Greek and English, besides just being a translation.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
James Spinti
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Re: Passive verbs + instrumental datives without ἐν

Post by James Spinti »

Carl,

You are starting to sound like a linguist! I love it!

: )

James
Proofreading and copyediting of ancient Near Eastern and biblical studies monographs
Stephen Hughes
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Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: Passive verbs + instrumental datives without ἐν

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Thucydides 7,67,3 wrote:ῥᾷσται (sc. αἱ νῆες) δὲ ἐς τὸ βλάπτεσθαι ἀφ' ὧν (= ἀπ' ἐκείνων ἃ) ἡμῖν παρεσκεύασται.
The ships are easy for to be destroyed from what by us had been prepared.
It would be easy for our ships to be destroyed by what we ourselves had prepared.
cf. Smyth 2523.

Is there some linguistic or stylistic reason for the choices of ἀπό (+gen.) and the dative of person here, rather than ὑπό (+gen.) option?
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
cwconrad
Posts: 2112
Joined: May 5th, 2011, 5:52 pm
Location: Burnsville, NC 28714
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Re: Passive verbs + instrumental datives without ἐν

Post by cwconrad »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
Thucydides 7,67,3 wrote:ῥᾷσται (sc. αἱ νῆες) δὲ ἐς τὸ βλάπτεσθαι ἀφ' ὧν (= ἀπ' ἐκείνων ἃ) ἡμῖν παρεσκεύασται.
The ships are easy for to be destroyed from what by us had been prepared.
It would be easy for our ships to be destroyed by what we ourselves had prepared.
cf. Smyth 2523.

Is there some linguistic or stylistic reason for the choices of ἀπό (+gen.) and the dative of person here, rather than ὑπό (+gen.) option?
I would assume that (1) the dative with the passive verb is standard and expected usage; (2) ὑπὸ + gen. is ordinarily used with a personal agent, whereas here we're dealing with an instrument (or several instruments, in this case); (3) since the dative of agent is already in use with ἡμῖν, we might not want to use an instrumental dative as part of the same syntactic unit. I don't know whether that's the answer or not, but I do think that ῥᾷσται (sc. αἱ νῆες) δὲ ἐς τὸ βλάπτεσθαι οἷς (= ἐκείνοις ἃ) ἡμῖν παρεσκεύασται would be more awkward than what Thucydides has written (Of course, Thucydides delighted in making it difficult for us if it was humanly possible.)
οὔτοι ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς πάντα θεοὶ θνητοῖς ὑπέδειξαν,
ἀλλὰ χρόνῳ ζητέοντες ἐφευρίσκουσιν ἄμεινον. (Xenophanes, Fragment 16)

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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