John 2:6: attributive or predicate participles?

[Stephen Hughes]

There is nothing at all ambiguous about the sentence "I saw six girls singing in the park." No native English speaker hears this as in any way ambiguous. I saw six girls. What were they doing? Singing in the park. Where were you when you saw them? Duh, I was in the park....

Well, I had better speak now or for ever my peace will be held for me (locked at least).

I disagree that there is no ambiguity. I think that native speakers have a way to deal with ambiguity - which is inherent in all utterances in all languages - by setting reasonable limits to their expectations for understanding. Second language learners often look for an exacting literalism that native speakers wouldn't push for. There is a need for some sort of fuzzy-set theory to better explain this.

The English example is one which we recognise as one that can't be pressed too hard.

We need to be talking about Greek, people.

It is not yet clear how far the Greek participle is ambiguous or exact in it's meaning. Jung is trying to find exactness, while the majority of his interlocutors seem to be saying saying that such exactness can't be found and that the meaning is self-evident. I take those statements to mean that it is not easily definable, and hence inexact. I think the assumption of equivalence needs to be tested.

[Barry Hofstetter]

There is nothing at all ambiguous about the sentence "I saw six girls singing in the park." No native English speaker hears this as in any way ambiguous. I saw six girls. What were they doing? Singing in the park. Where were you when you saw them? Duh, I was in the park...

Now, I think this has gone on long enough. We need to be talking about Greek, people. I'll give it another full day, and then I"m locking the topic.

This thread is about John 2:6. As far as I see, English participles, though their use is quite limited compared to the Greek one, shares the essential property with the Greek. I thought the judgement about English participles may be applied to
Greek.

Barry, do you mean that English speakers do not have any intention to use
the participle "singing" either in an attributive sense or in a predicative sense?
If taken attributive, the sentence would mean that I saw six girls who are singing, in contrast to contextually relevant girls, e.g. those who do other activities. If taken
predicative, the speaker charactersizes six girls as singing without intention to distinguish them from other possible entities. I feel I need to abandon the habit of thinking whether a particular participle is attributive or predicative which I learned from the standard grammars, IN THE CASE OF indefinite nouns + non-articular participles.

Thanks for engagement with me, with this little digression. I learned quite a bit.
Moon Jung.

English handles this through word order. "I saw six girls singing in the park" would be predicate in Greek, "I saw six singing girls in the park" would be attributive. Now, go find more Greek to discuss.