University of Groningen
Prepositions of Movement in New Testament Greek Merino Hernandez, Marta
DOI:
10.33612/diss.165832537
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Publication date: 2021
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Merino Hernandez, M. (2021). Prepositions of Movement in New Testament Greek: an Essay of Semantic Analysis. University of Groningen. https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.165832537
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Propositions
1. As is shown by the evolution of the Greek prepositional system, which led prepositions to express the local value of pause and movement in a more rigorous way than cases, Greek prepositions are not empty words, they have some inherent semantic value.
2. The semantic content of prepositions is not as defined as in other words, especially, due to the fact that the Greek prepositional system is complementary to the cases, which represents an area of study midway between Grammatology and Lexicography. Therefore, the study of the context (the words of the prepositional regime, as well as the subject and the verb) is necessary to specify their meaning.
3. An appropriate methodology for the study of prepositions such the offered by the
Diccionario Griego-Español del Nuevo Testamento (DGENT), must follow a fundamentally
semantic approach (although without avoiding the morphosyntactic aspect) for their analysis, offering a systematic distinction between lexical and contextual meaning, as well as between meaning and translation.
4. Prepositional polysemy is not accidental or random ––there is always a link between different potential semantic values of the same preposition. The original spatial semantic value of a preposition extends to more abstract notions thanks to the phenomenon of metaphor and metonymy. Thus prepositional polysemy can be explained as a chain of semantic extensions arising from the nucleus (spatial concept).
5. An appropriate methodological approach for the study of prepositions would also allow explain such polysemy specifying the causes or contextual factors that affect the semantic and translation change of a preposition when it appears in different contexts. Thus approach would pay attention to the morphologic, syntactic, semantic and extra-textual aspects of the context in which the preposition appears.
6. Finally, the proposed perspective of analysis would be very useful to avoid interpretive errors in the exegesis of those New Testament passages which rely on the meaning of a preposition, helping accurately to detect the significant sphere of each morpholexeme in context and resolving interpretative disagreements about the meaning of the preposition in question.
