[b-greek] Re: Nominative in Appositon

From: Randy Leedy (Rleedy@bju.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 04 2001 - 10:58:40 EDT


Clay wrote:

>>>... am having a little trouble with the nominative case in
apposition and distinguishing it from predicate nominative in a
verbless clause.

Can anyone explain to me why the a predicate nominative in a verbless
clause
is not just an example of apposition? My mind has been perhaps
polluted by
reading Dana and Manty on the nominative where they call it the
appositonal
case.
<<<

This may seem like pretty basic stuff, and I don't mean to imply,
Clay, that you're ignorant of it. But I think that, however obvious
some of this stuff may be, a concise answer will have to start at
square one, which is to note that the two basic constituents of any
clause are the subject and the predicate. The subject is the topic
under discussion, and the predicate is the statement made, question
asked, or command issued. The Greek nominative serves primarily to
identify a word as the clause's subject. Now for what I'm driving at:
the predicate nominative is in PREDICATE portion of the sentence; it
specifies an equative sort of ASSERTION (or question or command) about
the subject, hence agreeing in case with the nominative subject.

The simple appositive is different, because its relation to its head
word does not span the subject-predicate divide within the clause. It
operates instead within the same segment of the clause as the word it
renames. So "Dan Leedy, my father, is a fine man" entails a
significantly different relationship between the two nominatives ("Dan
Leedy" and "father") than "Dan Leedy [is] my father" (elliptical verb
supplied in brackets, since your question specifies a verbless
clause). In the former case, "my father" simply adds information about
the subject; in the second, it expresses the predicate of the
sentence: it makes the statement that I want the sentence ot make. If
it's not the predicate, then I don't have a complete sentence.

Now, to quibble about some other details. Remember that a simple
appositive (as opposed to the genitive of apposition, which I'm not
discussing here) is written in the case agreeing with the head word
(the word it renames). I almost get the impression that you're
suggesting that appositives are in the nominative case across the
board. I don't know for sure where you're getting the idea that Dana
and Mantey characterize it as the appositional case. A glance at my
copy reveals no such statement, though they do describe its
development in terms of its being used in apposition to the verb's
understood subject. But that's a far cry from saying that its basic
function is appositional with no qualifications about what it renames.
What I see DM saying is that its basic function is to name the subject
of the sentence.

Hope there's some help here. Bottom line: I do see a distinction of
the sort whose existence you're questioning, and it appears to me to
be an important one that is clearly identifiable within specific
contexts.

Blessings! (Acts 3:26)

Randy Leedy
Bob Jones Unversity
RLeedy@bju.edu

P.S. I get only the digest, so any reply that I should see before
tomorrow should be CC'ed directly to me.

---
B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [jwrobie@mindspring.com]
To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-327Q@franklin.oit.unc.edu
To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu




This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:37:00 EDT