List of Articular Infinitives

[Stephen Carlson]

I need a list of articular infinitives in a corpus that includes at the least the NT. Has such a list been published or can it be easily queried (and posted here), as with Jonathan and Micheal's syntax trees?

Thanks!

(I have a demo copy of Bibleworks 9 but I don't really use it.)

[Stephen Hughes]

Hefin Jones made two New Testament lists for me in July the year before last, when I was asking about a book about articular infinitives by Denny Burk.

The first was

222 articular infinitives which conform to the pattern article + infinitive (i.e. with nothing intervening) found in 199 sentences of the GNT/NA27 text.

and the second was

a list conforming to article + negative particle + infinitive pattern

containing 32 examples.

The result is colour-coded in the .pdf's, so if it is possible to embed a .pdf in a post, then I could share that here.

[Stephen Carlson]

Thanks for reminding me of Denny Burk's book, and the previous thread. I would love to see the list.

[Stephen Carlson]

According to this review of Burk's book at http://jimhamilton.info/2007/08/28/denn ... testament/:

Burk observes that the 324 articular infinitives in the New Testament fall into two broad categories: 200 of these are governed by a preposition, and 124 of them are not governed by a preposition.

So there are some more than what Hefin's quickie search found.

FWIW, according to the review Burk takes the view that the article is pretty much a syntactic structuring device in this construction.

[Louis L Sorenson]

There are apparently 324 examples of the articular infinitive in the NT (+-textual variants). So what we need is another list of 1000-2000 examples in classical Greek or more importantly Koine texts of the articular infinitive to be able to put the articular infinitive in perspective. Does the Koine dialect (period) use the infinitive in the same ways as the classical period? (400-150 B.C.) or is Koine use different. My gut feeling is that the articular use of the infinitive is the same....., but I cannot make a good summation of Koine usage. Goetchius §259 talks about the anarthorus infinitive; in §261 he discusses the articular infinitive. His discussion is a very categorized; but it does not address Koine~Classical differences. (If I had a choice, I would make all 2nd year students have a copy of Goetchius and study it thoroughly. His presentation is better than Funk and more concise).

......Dr. Denny Burk of the Criswell College in Dallas, Texas has offered the field of Greek language studies a helpful and insightful treatment on the articular infinitive. Before one thinks that such a task is too large for one work, it should be noticed that he has focused his research on the 324 examples of this construction in the New Testament itself while using examples from the Septuagint to test his thesis.

I doubt there is any syntax analysis (tagging of classical texts) for the articular infinitive - I use Logos software, and really do not use their syntactic search engine. Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen who created the software Emdros, used by Logos software, may have some suggestions. Logos keeps adding classical texts to their database, but I do not know if the classical texts are searched to the same extent as the biblical texts. Perhaps some Attic grammars such as Cooper may contain lists. It is possible to search texts for patterns such as τῷ τοῦ, τὸν, ...... *ειν, *σαι,*σθαι, .... for such patterns across all Greek texts (such as the TLG corpus). That query would at least get a number of extant examples. I doubt mi verbs would differ from omega verbs. Does anyone have some suggestions in reference to syntax searches?

[Stephen Carlson]

I found an 1896 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Chicago that presents a list of categorized infinitives in the NT (and LXX) by Clyde W. Votaw: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd00 ... 3004us.pdf

[Thomas Dolhanty]

My quick Bibleworks query of the NT yields 222 hits in 204 verses - article + infinitive with nothing in between. In the Greek Bible (including apocrypha) it is 2574 hits in 2243 verses.

[Thomas Dolhanty]

... and then refining the NT search to match the query that Burk shows on his website - 312 hits in 289 verses.

[Stephen Hughes]

I found an 1896 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Chicago that presents a list of categorized infinitives in the NT (and LXX) by Clyde W. Votaw: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd00 ... 3004us.pdf

I guess he would have actually had to have read through both the Septuagint and New Testament to find those instances then slip them and arrange them.

Now lately in processing Greek, I'm looking for information that blanket terms based on the form like infinitive - can't give me. I want information like, that verb is used as an infinitive of purpose in such and so a construction, or with a certain verb.

The classification data on pgg 30 - 40 of that thesis are valuable for me in that regard.

[George F Somsel]

In the NT I find 204 verses with the positive articular infinitive and 31 with the negative (τὸ μὴ). It would be a bit bulky to post so I would suggest that you learn to use Bibleworks so you can run the search yourself.