Thanks, Jonathan, where would you advise me to look them up? Yes, I had thought that the 'genitive of subordination', for example, was probably spurious, since I would have thought that the idea of subordination was coming from the head noun and hardly from the genitive. But apart from one or two additions, the rest seem to be standard. But Justin Cofer has a further criticism:Jonathan Robie wrote: For that, you mostly need to know how to look up the terms as they occur in the commentaries. And in Wallace and Mounce, you will find categories that the commentaries do not use.
Justin, if you have time, could you explain this a bit further? On the face of it, this type of limitation seems almost inevitable since all these grammars are written in English, and so it must be difficult, to say the least, to get out of English categories of thought. Who would you recommend to learn from?Justin Cofer wrote: Wallace is a different animal. What makes it different from Robertson, Smyth, etc. is that teaches the student to make a half-conjectural translation, and then to (at least implicitly) reason back from English to the Greek. The student never leaves the grid of thinking in English and translating.
I had a quick look at the modern post-Chomsky study of adnominal genitives and found a five fold classification of their semantic function into 'possession', 'description', 'inherent relation', 'subject' and 'object'. The term 'process noun' seems to be used in the place of 'verbal noun', which I suppose allows for head nouns to carry the notion of a subject in the genitive noun, without there being an actual cognate verb in view. For example, 'the opera of Verdi' and 'the policy of the king' are classified under 'subject'. Overall, the distinctions that are being made seem to be of the same general type as in the more traditional terminology. (http://www.utexas.edu/courses/slavling/ ... ssives.pdf
Andrew