Subject and Predicate in 1 Cor 11:3 παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἡ κεφαλὴ [ὁ] Χριστός ἐστιν

[Barry Hofstetter]

At the propositional level, sure, but propositional meaning is not the only thing that a text conveys.

Good point. What else do you see the text conveying here depending on which one is the predicate?

Well, the topic structure of the discourse for one. (See Wallace's implied questions.) There is also an interesting textual variant over whether Χριστός has the article, and it would be nice to know which one made more sense for Paul.

This is guild-speak. The average NT student with seminary level Greek will not get it. Can you translate? What difference does this make in our understanding of the text, our exegesis of the text, and how we might explain it to a congregation or or Bible study?

[Stephen Carlson]

Good point. What else do you see the text conveying here depending on which one is the predicate?

Well, the topic structure of the discourse for one. (See Wallace's implied questions.) There is also an interesting textual variant over whether Χριστός has the article, and it would be nice to know which one made more sense for Paul.

This is guild-speak. The average NT student with seminary level Greek will not get it. Can you translate? What difference does this make in our understanding of the text, our exegesis of the text, and how we might explain it to a congregation or or Bible study?

I'm sensing some hostility here and I really don't like it.

[Jonathan Robie]

Well, the topic structure of the discourse for one. (See Wallace's implied questions.) There is also an interesting textual variant over whether Χριστός has the article, and it would be nice to know which one made more sense for Paul.

This is guild-speak. The average NT student with seminary level Greek will not get it. Can you translate? What difference does this make in our understanding of the text, our exegesis of the text, and how we might explain it to a congregation or or Bible study?

I'm sensing some hostility here and I really don't like it.

I can't speak for Barry, but I don't feel hostility in that. It's easy to get absorbed in the mechanisms we create to systematically explore the text, but they are often an attempt to reconstruct the way the author or the recipient understood it. If I understand Barry correctly, I suspect he is saying that translating back into the world of normal human discourse is a very useful way to ground our theories, and suggesting that would be helpful for this example.

[Barry Hofstetter]

Well, the topic structure of the discourse for one. (See Wallace's implied questions.) There is also an interesting textual variant over whether Χριστός has the article, and it would be nice to know which one made more sense for Paul.

This is guild-speak. The average NT student with seminary level Greek will not get it. Can you translate? What difference does this make in our understanding of the text, our exegesis of the text, and how we might explain it to a congregation or or Bible study?

I'm sensing some hostility here and I really don't like it.

No hostility at all! But so often we throw around metalanguage, and I'm inviting you to wax eloquent on the "pay off" for this insight (which I think is good, BTW).

My thesis advisor for my Th.M. once made me rewrite several pages because he wanted people outside the discipline to be able to benefit from what I was saying if they should ever read it. It's something I think we should always be conscious of. Metalanguage from discourse analysis is still new to most people (and especially to poor benighted classicists such as myself), and showing how these insights are beneficial is a good thing.

[MAubrey]

I should add that 1 Cor 11:7b ἡ γυνὴ δὲ δόξα ἀνδρός ἐστιν puzzles me on this hypothesis.

The woman, she is man's glory.

???

Shouldn't that be ἡ γυνὴ δὲ ἀνδρός ἐστιν δόξα instead?

This is where I'm unsure about the ways ἐστιν might diverge from the usage of the pronouns. Because on the one hand, yes, that's what we'd expect. A clitic pronoun would not come after δόξα. But on the other hand, the information structure of the larger chunk of text also points to the "she is man's glory" reading, I think.

[Stephen Carlson]

This is guild-speak. The average NT student with seminary level Greek will not get it. Can you translate? What difference does this make in our understanding of the text, our exegesis of the text, and how we might explain it to a congregation or or Bible study?

I'm sensing some hostility here and I really don't like it.

I can't speak for Barry, but I don't feel hostility in that. It's easy to get absorbed in the mechanisms we create to systematically explore the text, but they are often an attempt to reconstruct the way the author or the recipient understood it. If I understand Barry correctly, I suspect he is saying that translating back into the world of normal human discourse is a very useful way to ground our theories, and suggesting that would be helpful for this example.

I feel that Barry and I are peers, so I was taken aback at the language-policing aspect. If I'm being unclear to one I'm responding to, that's one thing, and something I can address. But I wasn't being asked to do that.

[Stephen Carlson]

The woman, she is man's glory.

Shouldn't that be ἡ γυνὴ δὲ ἀνδρός ἐστιν δόξα instead?

This is where I'm unsure about the ways ἐστιν might diverge from the usage of the pronouns. Because on the one hand, yes, that's what we'd expect. A clitic pronoun would not come after δόξα. But on the other hand, the information structure of the larger chunk of text also points to the "she is man's glory" reading, I think.

I'm unsure too. ἐστιν often behaves like clitic pronouns, but not always and in ways that I haven't yet been able to completely characterize. Given its heaviness (two syllables), maybe it is more reluctant to break up short noun phrases (but cf. Matt 1:20 τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου·)? Or maybe δόξα is somehow unaccented as it is a repetition of δόξα θεοῦ in the immediately preceding clause? But you're right that information structure of the larger chunk of text points to άνδρός being focal.

Also bugging me in this sentence is the unexpected ἡ γυνὴ δὲ ... instead of ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ... .

[Stephen Carlson]

No hostility at all! But so often we throw around metalanguage, and I'm inviting you to wax eloquent on the "pay off" for this insight (which I think is good, BTW).

No worries, but I think I'll decline the invitation to "wax eloquent." It's just discourse analysis and there are better people than me to promote it.

My thesis advisor for my Th.M. once made me rewrite several pages because he wanted people outside the discipline to be able to benefit from what I was saying if they should ever read it. It's something I think we should always be conscious of. Metalanguage from discourse analysis is still new to most people (and especially to poor benighted classicists such as myself), and showing how these insights are beneficial is a good thing.

True, but if I'm confusing you, just say so. It's a subsidiary point that I didn't think would be at issue in our particular context and so I wanted to briefly point to it and move on. If I had to expound every subsidiary point for a hypothetical reader, I'd never post anything on this forum.

[Stirling Bartholomew]

It's just discourse analysis and there are better people than me to promote it.

{ ...}

If I had to expound every subsidiary point for a hypothetical reader, I'd never post anything on this forum.

Yes. And by the way, I don't have a clue what our class 5.7 rock climbing photographer[1] is talking about. Clitics? Nothing about it in the works I have read. So this lingo problem isn't unique to one particular framework.

Sounds like a branch of linguistics that deals with sounds. I skipped over that when I was reading Saussure.

[1] Did you every sell your Nikkor 200mm F2.0 ? (off topic)

[Stephen Carlson]

Yes. And by the way, I don't have a clue what our class 5.7 rock climbing photographer[1] is talking about. Clitics? Nothing about it in the works I have read. So this lingo problem isn't unique to one particular framework.

Sounds like a branch of linguistics that deals with sounds. I skipped over that when I was reading Saussure.

The terms enclitics and proclitics are traditional Greek grammar terms; clitic just refers to the superset.