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Attendant Circumstance Participles


Clint Cozier

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I'm trying to look at attendant circumstance participles like πορευθέντες in Matt. 28.19 as they relate to imperatives like μαθητεύσατε. I can do a morphological search that captures the construction using AGREE and WITHIN to narrow down the hits. I thought I'd try a syntax search, but the initial participle is an adjunct predicate, while the imperative is another predicate clause (I think that's right). Is there a simple way to capture the construction using syntax?  I'm not sure I understand why both verbals are not in the same predicate unit since they both convey the verbal action of the sentence.

 

Thanks.

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Hi Clint,

 

  It's questions like these that prompted me to ask about syntax theory underlying the syntax charts the other week. How does one go from a language feature like the 'attendant circumstance' participle to a syntax construction. I have not got very far yet since that question was posed though I am doing the reading. In any case I looked up the attendant circumstance participle in Wallace GGBB and found some interesting things. He defines it as having, in perhaps 90% of cases, the following characteristics :

 

    • The tense of the participle is usually aorist.

    • The tense of the main verb is usually aorist.69

    • The mood of the main verb is usually imperative or indicative.70

    • The participle will precede the main verb—both in word order and time of event (though usually there is a very close proximity).

    • Attendant circumstance participles occur frequently in narrative literature, infrequently elsewhere.71


Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: an Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Accordance electronic ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 642.

 

  Now, having read the text accompanying this I am wondering whether attendant circumstance (AC) is truly a syntactic definition or not. The clausal structure as it relates to AC is not discussed in Wallace so far as I can see. Wallace describes the category as overused by some and denied by others. The way he describes its identification leads me to think that a syntax search will still leave you with a bunch of weeding to do. Undeterred by all the above I pressed on.

 

The way I normally approach something like this is to open the syntax diagram at a few examples and see how it is presented and then derive the search from it. I suspect this is not the best approach and it's why I am trying to understand the theory. What I found was that the participle is a predicate in an adjunct clause under an overarching predicate phrase. I tried a few things and came up with this :

 

post-32023-0-84852500-1430972458_thumb.jpg

 

Due to point 5 above and simply to quicken things up a bit I constrained my range to the Gospels. I then set the scope to Chapter which is more or less required. I would like to have used Sentence or rather top level independent clause but neither are supported. I still got 1017 hits which seems an awful lot. It does contain some key examples from Wallace, and the one you are looking at, so it's not hopeless.

 

I hope this is of some help to you. It was very interesting to do and educational for me so I'm glad you asked about.

 

Thx

D

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  • 6 months later...

The post  How to search for conjunctive participles is now updated. The search is now clean and accurate, and it hits Matthew 28:19. Thanks to the progress that the syntax has made, the post is now much shorter than the original.

Edited by Marco V. Fabbri
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Daniel,

 

the search guide that I prepared for conjunctive Participles doesn't restrict the the tense of the Participle, nor the tense of the Verb of the superordinate clause. Neither does it limit the distance between the two verbs. You probably wanted something more limited, and added restrictions.

 

I would suggest three changes to your search:

  1. there is no need to add Predicate to the Verb participle
  2. you need to restrict the Verb participle to Nominative
  3. as the order of the two verbs is not always the same, you would need to click the button Search both directions

 

 

Hi Clint,

 

  It's questions like these that prompted me to ask about syntax theory underlying the syntax charts the other week. How does one go from a language feature like the 'attendant circumstance' participle to a syntax construction. I have not got very far yet since that question was posed though I am doing the reading. In any case I looked up the attendant circumstance participle in Wallace GGBB and found some interesting things. He defines it as having, in perhaps 90% of cases, the following characteristics :

 

    • The tense of the participle is usually aorist.

    • The tense of the main verb is usually aorist.69

    • The mood of the main verb is usually imperative or indicative.70

    • The participle will precede the main verb—both in word order and time of event (though usually there is a very close proximity).

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