Greek Prepositions in the New Testament

A Cognitive-Functional Description

Rachel Aubrey

Michael Aubrey

GREEK PREPOSITIONS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT: A COGNITIVE-FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION

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Unless otherwise noted, Greek New Testament text is from the SBL Greek New Testament (sblgnt) and English Bible text is from the Lexham English Bible (leb).

Prepositions: An Overview of Their Syntax and Semantics

Prepositions are relational words. In their most basic senses, they establish a relationship in space between something that can move or change, a trajector, and something that is presented as a stationary point of reference, a landmark. To put it another way: Prepositions communicate something about the trajector’s position relative to the landmark. Below we find the preposition signals the bird’s location and motion relative to the air, the apple’s location relative to the basket, the cow’s trajectory relative to the moon, and so forth.

The bird flew through the air

Trajector Verb Prep Landmark

The apple in the basket

Trajector Prep Landmark

The cow went over the moon

Trajector Verb Prep Landmark

The earth traveled around the sun

Trajector Verb Prep Landmark

The knives on the table

Trajector Prep Landmark

In their syntax, the trajector is external to the prepositional phrase and the landmark fills the role of the object of the preposition. In the example sentence The earth traveled around the sun, the preposition is around, the object of the preposition is the sun, and the entire prepositional phrase is around the sun. Note that the landmark is always the object of the preposition, here the sun, whereas the trajector may fill any number of roles in the sentence. In I washed the dirt from my hand, the trajector the dirt is the direct object of the verb washed. But in The cow went over the moon, the trajector the cow is the grammatical subject of the verb went.

Two primary dimensions underlie this relationship: place and path. The first, place, defines the trajector’s position with respect to the landmark: John is on the chair, The apple is in the basket, The balloon is over the house.

The second, path, specifies the change in location of the trajector relative to the landmark. Some prepositions default to a static relationship, The hat is on the rack. The preposition on provides the location of the hat in relation to the rack. Others default to a dynamic relationship, The apple fell from the tree. The preposition from furnishes a path for the apple, specifying its change in location relative to the tree. Motion is a part of verbal semantics as well, which means that motion can be removed from or added to that default. We can add motion to otherwise static prepositions: Charlie went in the house. And we can remove motion from dynamic prepositions: Jenn is from St. Louis. Changing the larger event that the clause expresses affects the relationship ...