ASIA PACIFIC THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

SHOULD THE CONCEPT OF DEPONENCY BE ABOLISHED?

WITH AN EXEGESIS OF A SAMPLE VERB FROM 1 PETER

A PAPER SUBMITTED TO

DR. CHRIS CARTER

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF

THE MASTER OF THEOLOGY PROGRAM

BY

HIROKATSU YOSHIHARA

BAGUIO CITY, PHILIPPINES

JUNE 2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION 1

1. Locus of the Problem 1

2. Research Question, Thesis Statement and Outline 4

3. Brief Contour of Cognitive Linguistics 4

II. DISCUSSION 5

1. Key Linguistic Concepts 5

A. Levels of Linguistic Study 5

B. Subject, Object, and Thematic Roles 7

C. Prototype, Agency, Affectedness, and Transitivity 8

2. Discussion on the Middle and the Deponent 11

A. Suzanne Kemmer’s Typological Analysis of the Middle 11

B. Egbert Bakker’s Analysis of the Middle with Transitivity and Aktionsart 14

C. Daniel Wallace’ Analysis of New Testament Examples 15

D. Jonathan Pennington’s Question and Neva Miller’s Suggestion 19

E. How, Then, Should Deponency Be Treated? 20

3. Application to a DMP-Verb in 1 Peter 23

A. DMP-Verbs in 1 Peter 23

B. An Exegesis ‘ajpogivnomai’: ‘die’ in 2:24 25

III. CONCLUSION 29

BIBLIOGRAPHY 31

APPENDIX 36

1

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Locus of the Problem

The deponent verb is a challenge to every student of biblical Greek.1 In one of today’s

most popular introductory textbooks of the subject, William Mounce introduces it: “This is a

verb that is middle or passive in form but active in meaning. Its form is always middle or

passive, but its meaning is always active. It can never have a passive meaning.”2

One can readily understand how the verbal system of biblical Greek is complicated

around deponents, together with other complex elements. Compare the first four members3 of

the “tense stems” 4 of ‘ajgapavw’: ‘love’, ‘porouvomai’: ‘I go’, ‘givnomai’: ‘I become’ and

‘lambavnw’: ‘I take’:

ajgapavw ajgaphvsw hjgavphsa hjgavphka porouvomai (Deponent) porouvsomai (Dep) ----- ----- givnomai (Dep) genhvsomai (Dep) ejgenovmhn (Dep) gevgona

1 Strictly speaking, I prefer the nomenclature of the Greek of the New Testament, following what Stanly

Porter states as follows: “The first [“the Greek of the New Testament”] discusses the New Testament as one among

many corpora of Hellenistic Greek texts, while the second [“New Testament Greek”] treats the New Testament with

few significant references to extra-biblical Greek and a bit of an oddity in the linguistic panoply of the ancient

world.” Stanley Porter, “In Defence of Verbal Aspect,” in Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics, ed. Stanley

Porter and D. A. Carson (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993), 30-1 (square brackets, Porter’s own words supplied

by Yoshihara’s). In this article, I use biblical Greek for simplicity and convenience, for it implies the Greek of the

Septuagint and the New Testament, at least. It is a future task to test the findings of this article in the larger context

of Hellenistic Greek with more confidence in data and methodology.

2 William Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2003), 150.

This initial presentation is soon misleading, and Mounce quickly gives some more essential information, in addition,

on the next page: “In a single tense a verb will be either regular or deponent. It cannot be both. However, a verb

can be deponent in one tense and not deponent in another” (151).

3 The four categories are traditionally called the present active, the future active, the aorist active and the

perfect active, from the most left. The other two are excluded here because, being the perfect middle/passive and

the aorist passive, they are not related to the discussion between the active and the middle/passive by definition.

4 As far as I am informed, this is Mounce’ terminology, which others generally call the “principal parts.”

Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek, 382-95.

2

lambavnw lhvmyomai (Dep) e[labon ei[lhfa

As is represented here, ‘ajgapavw’ conjugates consistently in the active system, and

‘porouvomai’ in the middle deponent. Whereas, the conjugation patterns of the other two are

mixtures of the active and deponent systems, idiosyncratically distributed in different categories.

The instructional/descriptive formula for the deponent - “middle or passive in form but

active in meaning” - is commonly found among elementary-intermediate textbooks of biblical

Greek.5 Recent scholars have tried to give more detailed descriptions to the middle voice.

Daniel Wallace, for example, describes it along with the following subcategories: the Direct, the

Redundant, the Indirect, the Causative, the Permissive, the Reciprocal and the Deponent.

Carefully defining the deponent, he considers it to be a significant grammatical category.6 As is

discussed below, however, these efforts of analysis and categorization have a fundamental

methodological problem: these grammarians are not well-informed of the distinction between

semantics of the verb and the subject. In fact, deponents are to be spread into the other

subcategories listed above, according to their semantics - they are misplaced in the taxonomy.

On the other hand, Bernard Taylor proposes not to use the term and concept of

deponency, from his perspective as a lexicographer: it is “because the Greeks themselves never

found recourse to the concept despite their close attention to the form and function of their

language; and because it masks the meaning of the voices.”7 With his earlier experience of

5 James Allan Hewett, New Testament Greek (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1986), 88; David

Alan Black, It’s Still Greek to Me (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1998), 95; Richard Young, Intermediate New

Testament Greek (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman and Holman, 1994), 135, etc.

6 Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1996), 414-30.

Young also identifies the Direct, the Indirect, the Permissive, the Reciprocal and the Deponent. Young,

Intermediate New Testament Greek, 134-5.

7 Bernard Taylor, “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” in Biblical Greek Language and Lexicography,

ed. Bernard Taylor et al. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2004), 174.

3

learning Latin, where the word “deponent” was originally derived from “depono, “lay aside,””8

the term is misleading to him, for, in Latin, what is opposite to the active is the passive: in the

former, “the subject is the doer of the action” but, in the latter, “the subject for the most part is

the receiver of the action.”9 Since “the subject of middle verbs is still the doer of the action,

even if the subject bears a different relation to the result of the action than a verb in the active

voice,”10 Taylor thus proposes to lay aside “the notion of deponency.”11 The Latin grammatical

concept, Taylor contends,12 has been inappropriately imposed on the Greek system in vain.

Similarly, deponency has been challenged by a grammatical commentary series called

The Baylor Handbook on the Greek New Testament (BHGNT, henceforth). Mark Dubis, the

author of the commentary to 1 Peter in this series, states that BHGNT “adopts the viewpoint that

“deponency” is a misguided label, a viewpoint with which I concur.”13 Martin Culy, its series

editor, also suggests to abolish deponency in their series introduction:

The questions that have been raised regarding deponency as a syntactic category,

then, are not simply issues that interest a few Greek scholars and linguists but

have no bearing on how one understands the text. Rather, if these scholars14 are

correct, the notion of deponency has, at least in some cases, effectively obscured

the semantic significance of the middle voice, leading to imprecise readings of the

text.15

8 Taylor, “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” 170 (Italics, Taylor’s).

9 Both quotations in this sentence are from Taylor, “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” 171.

10 Taylor, “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” 173.

11 Taylor, “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” 175.

12 The other contention of Taylor, as a lexicographer, is to register Greek verbs in a future lexicon not in the

present active (or deponent) indicative first person singular but in the aorist infinitive (in the active if active forms

are predominantly attested, and in the middle/passive if majority). Although this is a significant proposal for serious

considerations, I will not deal with it here because it is beyond the scope of this article. See ibid.

13 Mark Dubis, 1 Peter (Waco, Texas: Baylor University, 2010; Libronix), xxi. There should be one

comment on what Dubis states here. He mentions that his comments on deponents in 1 Peter and thus his position to

abolish deponency reflects Suzanne Kemmer's work. Suzanne Kemmer, The Middle Voice (Amsterdam: John

Benjamins, 1993). However, he misunderstands her position. I will discuss this later.

14 This refers to A.T. Robertson, Carl Conrad and Jonathan Pennington. I will deal with Pennington later.

15 Martin Culy, “Series Introduction,” in Luke, ed. Martin Culy, Mikeal Parsons, and Joshua Stigall (Waco,

4

2. Research Question, Thesis Statement and Outline

In this article, I will therefore answer the following question through qualitative literature

research: Should the concept of deponency be abolished?16 I will show that the current situation

in biblical studies around the concept will be at least clarified by introducing some fundamental

linguistic concepts. The linguistic approach is mainly cognitive, in structural, typological and

historical studies. I will conclude that deponency should be properly placed, if not abolished, as

a category in a more systematic linguistic analysis of the voice system of the language while the

concept in a different term - “DMP verb” - will be helpful for language pedagogy. I will also

take one deponent verb found in 1 Peter - ‘ajpogivnomai’: ‘die’ - to show that such a systematic

linguistic understanding is beneficial in exegesis, in connection with Dubis mentioned above.

3. Brief Contour of Cognitive Linguistics

Before entering discussions, I would like to present a brief contour of cognitive

linguistics as a note. One of the most popular textbooks of the field says that cognitive

linguistics “began to emerge in the 1970s and has been increasingly active since the 1980s”17

with major concern on semantics, but also on historical linguistics.18

Two of “three major hypotheses” of cognitive linguistics are: 1) “language is not an

autonomous cognitive faculty”; and 2) “grammar is conceptualization.”19 They implicate 1) that

Texas: Baylor University, 2010; Libronix), xii.

16 Since the passive voice was under development in classical and Hellenistic Greek and passive deponents

are limited in number, this article will mainly deal with middle deponents. Benjamin Fortson, Indo-European

Language and Culture (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2004), 82, 231.

17 William Croft, and D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2004), 1.

18 ibid. This is a hope to biblical studies because of its methodological possibility for historical research on

Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and other related research languages in the future.

19 ibid.

5

“linguistic knowledge - knowledge of meaning and form - is basically conceptual structure”20

and 2) “the cognitive processes that govern language use, in particular the construction and

communication of meaning by language, are in principle the same as other cognitive abilities.”21

Deponency is related to many grammatical issues of biblical Greek.22 The voice system

in a language “refers to a category of the verb” and “is manifested in which alterations in the

shapes of verbs signal alternations in the configurations of nominal statuses with which verbs are

in particular relationships.”23 Here, alterations of “nominal statuses” are primarily motivated by

different choices of sentential subjects, which result in changes of the verbal forms and the

representations of other participants, in the active and the middle (and the passive in the future

and the aorist) in biblical Greek. Since cognitive linguistics sees such a choice is “a reflection of

the general cognitive principle of figure/ground segregation,”24 studying deponency and the

voice system in light of cognitive linguistics, with other semantic functions such as transitivity

and affectedness to be discussed later, has a possibility of shedding new light to the study of the

language and, hopefully, some cognitive behaviors and patterns of people who were using it,

including writing biblical texts. This article would like to be another small step for integration of

modern linguistics and biblical studies in terms of the study of biblical Greek.25

20 Croft and Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics, 2.

21 ibid.

22 T. Givón, one of the founders of functional linguistics, which turned to be a forerunner of cognitive

linguistics, says, “Voice is probably the most complex grammar-coded functional domain in language.” T. Givón,

Functionalism and Grammar (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995), 71.

23 M. H. Klaiman, Grammatical Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1991), 1.

24 Friedrich Ungerer, and Hans-Jörg Schmid, An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (London: Longman,

1996), 172.

25 As to some preceding great efforts in this direction, see Appendix.

6

II. DISCUSSION

1. Key Linguistic Concepts

A. Levels of Linguistic Study

As scientific study of human language, linguistics has traditionally identified some levels

to study linguistic structure: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and

pragmatics. As written forms are objects in studying biblical Greek, morphology/syntax

concerning form and semantics/pragmatics concerning meaning/function especially matter.1

Morphology is “the analysis of the structure of words.”2 Syntax is “(the analysis) of the

structure of phrases and sentences.”3 Semantics “deals with the conventional meaning conveyed

by the use of words, phrases and sentences of a language”4 while pragmatics is “the study of

what speaker means, or ‘speaker meaning’”5 and of “how more is communicated than is said.”6

1 Phonetics is “the general study of the characteristics of speech sounds.” George Yule, The Study of

Language, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2006), 30. As we have no access to physically recorded

sounds from the biblical times, this level of study does not matter to us. However, there is one more level of

linguistic study of sounds. That is phonology, which is “essentially the description of the systems and patterns of

speech sounds in a language” (43). Yule elaborates: “It is, in effect, based on a theory of what every speaker of a

language unconsciously knows about the sound patterns of that language. Because of this theoretical status,

phonology is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with the actual

physical articulation of speech sounds” (43-4). Morphological changes in history are often motivated and triggered

by phonological changes in language users’ knowledge and phonetic changes in their practice.

2 Yule, The Study of Language, 246. Morphology is a significant level in Greek studies because Greek is a

highly inflectional language with rich morphology - suffixes and clitics - to realize declensions and conjugations.

3 Yule, The Study of Language, 251.

4 Yule, The Study of Language, 100.

5 Yule, The Study of Language, 112.

6 Yule, The Study of Language, 248. In other words, the former analyzes the sentential meaning, the truth

conditions and denotation, which are more inherent to linguistic forms, and the latter does the contextual meaning,

the speaker/writer’s intention and connotation, more dependent on and affected by the given context.

Thus, for the sentence “oJ qeo;V ajgavph e[stin,” morphology analyzes “oJ” is in the nominative masculine

7

What is important is each of the levels is independent of the others while being influential to one

another: best efforts to separate them are indispensable to a more valid linguistic analysis.

B. Subject, Object, and Thematic Roles7

In a Greek sentence, the subject is morphologically marked in the nominative case, and

the object, in the accusative (e.g. ‘ajgapavw’: ‘love’).8 While the subject, the object and other

nominal elements called the oblique in a sentence are syntactic categories, linguistics posits that

verbal knowledge also includes semantic categories called thematic roles.9 Several of them, also

called semantic roles, have been suggested. John Saeed identifies AGENT, PATIENT, THEME,

BENEFICIARY, INSTRUMENT, LOCATION, GOAL and SOURCE. 10 For example, the conceptual

singular, etc.; syntax analyzes “oJ qeovV” is the subject of the verb “e[stin,” etc.; semantics analyzes that the sentence

means that God is love; and pragmatics analyzes that this writer wants to communicate the truth and to see the

reader be comforted, and so on. However, the definitions of “God,” “love,” or even “is” can be different, person by

person. Thus, once one talks about semantics, it can quickly slide into pragmatics. This is a reason of

communicative difficulties, both inraculturally and interculturally.

7 Albert Rijksbaron provides concise explanations on some of what is covered in this section from a

traditional descriptive perspective. Albert Rijksbaron, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek, 3d

ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2002), 135, 137.

8 There are, however, verbs that take a genitive object (e.g. ‘a{ptomai’: ‘touch’), a dative (e.g.

‘ajkolouqevw’: ‘follow’), two objects (e.g. ‘divdwmi’: ‘give’), an object and a verbal form such as an infinitive or

participle (e.g. ‘oJravw’: ‘see’), etc. These differences occur from different conceptual structures of the verbs.

Since the subject and the object are morphologically marked, they are rather free syntactically, namely in

the arrangement of words or the word order in a Greek sentence. This kind of statement is an example of some

benefits from more intricate and objective study of a language through different levels of analysis.

9 “A predicate defines a set of highly specific roles . . . Examining the nature of the relations between these

roles and grammatical relations, we find that it is far from arbitrary: there are always far-reaching regularities and

generalizations, statable in terms of semantically definable classes of roles. . . . Semantic roles are important in the

study of grammatical functions since grammatical functions usually express semantic roles in a highly systematic

way.” Avery Andrews, “The Major Functions of the Noun Phrase,” in Language Typology and Syntactic

Description, vol. 1, ed. Timothy Shopen (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1985), 67.

10 Saeed defines these thematic roles with some examples as follows (underlines, Yoshihara’s): “agent”:

“the initiator of some action, capable of acting with volition”: “David cooked the rashers”; “patient”: “the entity

undergoing the effect of some action, often undergoing some change in state”: “Enda cut back these bushes”;

“theme”: “the entity which is moved by an action, or whose location is described”: “Roberto passed the ball wide”:

“The book is in the library”; “experiencer”: “the entity which is aware of the action or state described by the

predicate but which is not in control of the action or states”: “Kevin felt ill”; “beneficiary”: “the entity for whose

benefit the action was <sic> performed”: “Robert filled in the form for his grandmother”; “instrument”: “the means

by which an action is performed or something comes about”: “She cleaned the wound with an antiseptic wipe”;

“location”: “the place in which something is situated or takes place”: “The monster was hiding under the bed”;

8

structure of ‘ajgapavw’ is poised to have an EXPERIENCER11 for the subject and a THEME for the

object. Similarly, ‘a{ptomai’: ‘touch’ is with AGENT for the subject and PATIENT for the object.

What verb is with what thematic role(s) in what morphological devices and what syntactic

structure is part of the culturally-shared knowledge in the linguistic community, yet grounded

also on more or less universal human cognition, to enable communication.12

Although morphology and syntax are observable in speech/writing, however, semantic

categories such as thematic roles are not discreet, and their understandings are based on each

person’s construal from context. 13 Presuming a single semantic label for an entity in

communication is thus only a convenient construct: the real process of communication is far

more complicated. This is especially true in semantic and pragmatic description and analysis.

What is at issue here is that semantic interpretation roughly defined by social convention

is influenced, guided and finalized in the negotiation between the speaker/writer’s construal and

that of the hearer/reader in a given context. In this sense, human cognition crucially functions in

grammar and communication. This is a strong rationale for adopting the cognitive linguistic

approach in discussing the deponent and the middle of biblical Greek in this article.

C. Prototype, Agency, Affectedness, and Transitivity

Because linguistic categories, especially semantic categories as introduced above, are not

“goal”: “the entity towards which something moves, either literally . . . or metaphorically . . .”: “Sheila handed her

license to the policeman”; “source”: “the entity from which something moves, either literally . . . or metaphorically .

. .”: “The plane came back from Kinshasa.” John I. Saeed, Semantics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell,

1997), 140-1.

11 Thematic roles can be conventionally represented in small capitals or triangular brackets in linguistics.

12 A considerable application of thematic roles and grammar of biblical texts is: Wong, A Classification of

Semantic Case-Relations in the Pauline Epistles (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).

13 For example, when Christians say that love is action, the construal of the thematic roles of the sentence

“God loves you” will be re-construed as AGENT for the subject with volition and as PATIENT for the object with

change, rather than EXPERIENCER of an emotion and THEME to which it is directed. Even THEME for the object can

be construed as GOAL at the same time, the role for the subject being identified as SOURCE.

9

discreet but flexible and graded due to human cognition and construal, cognitive linguistics has

recognized the importance of another key concept - prototype. Saeed writes:

This is a model of concepts which view them as structured so that there are

central or typical members of a category . . . but then a shading off into less

typical or peripheral members.14

Although one of the most popular realms where this theory has been exemplified is

lexical categorization such as ‘bird,’15 it also applies to grammatical categories such as thematic

roles. Ungerer and Schmid calls them “role archetypes”:

The roles are not just a linguistic construct, but part of the range of cognitive

instruments which we use for linguistic, and also for non-linguistic, mental

processing. . . . Like cognitive categories in general, the role archetypes are not

discreet categories, but gradual phenomena.16

The most prototypical thematic role for the subject, which is a concern in the study of the

deponent and the middle, is AGENT. It is not discreet but gradual, too. A subject’s “agent-hood”

is construed with some parametric subcategories, namely agency, affectedness and transitivity.17

As to agency, Saeed quotes from Donald Dowty - his “properties of the agent proto-role”:

“a) volitional involvement in the event or state; b) sentience (and/or perception); c) causing an

event or change of state in another participant; and d) movement (relative to the position of

14 Saeed, Semantics, 37.

15 Ungerer and Schmid introduces Eleanor Rosch’s experiment in 1975, which shows that the most typical

bird among her subjects was robin, followed by sparrow, bluejay, blue bird and canary, the last five being ostrich,

titmouse, emu, penguin and bat. Elenor Rosch, “Cognitive Representations of Semantic Categories,” Journal of

Experimental Psychology, General (1975), (concrete pages not provided), quoted by Ungerer and Schmid, An

Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, 13. A similar experiment in Japan will pick up sparrow, dove, raven, etc. As

this suggests, prototypes culturally vary, especially in lexical categorization. This is natural, considering different

geographic and cultural environments. However, grammatical categories are more cognitively conceptualized, as is

to be seen below in Kemmer’s typological studies, and they thus show more universal characters.

16 Ungerer and Schmid, An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, 174.

17 There is one more crucial semantic concept related to subject-hood, which is higher than agent-hood, and

the voice system - control. Control is in fact one of the contributions of Klaiman, Grammatical Voice. However, I

did not include it in my discussion here because it is more philosophical and complicated. Incorporating it in my

analysis of the voice in biblical Greek is my future task.

10

another participant).”18 This means that, the more these characteristics are recognized with the

subject, the more agency is construed with it.19

Another semantic concept important for subject semantics is affectedness. Klaiman

defines it as “characteristic of a participant in a verbally encoded situation which is typically

sentient, is outranked for potential control by no other participant, and upon which delve the

principal effects of the denoted event or situation.”20 The most typical grammatical construction

related to affectedness is the passive, where the subject is an affected entity from the denoted

event: as in “my camera was broken in the accident”; “my camera was stolen in a train”; and

“my camera was found in the room,” etc.21

18 David Dowty, “Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection,” Language 67 (1991), 572, quoted by

Saeed, Semantics, 151.

19 For example in English, “John,” in “John broke the vase by throwing it to the floor,” is construed with a

higher degree of agency because his a) intention, b) awareness, c) bringing about of a irrevocable change and d)

physical contact (the ultimate result of his movement). The degree lowers, say, in “John broke the vase without his

knowledge” (his hand touched it when he was passing by - lack of intention, sense/knowledge and lower contact).

Also important for subject semantics is what is generally called the animacy hierarchy. This is related to

agency: the higher in this hierarchy, the more volition and sentience is construed and the more desired change will

be obtained with a more controlled movement (of a tool or one’s body part). Klaiman calls it Potentiality of Agency

Scale and lists up, from the highest to the lowest: “1) 1st person pronominal (‘I’), 2) 2nd person pronominal (‘you’),

3) 3rd person pronominal (‘s/he’), 4) proper noun (‘John’, ‘Mary’, etc.), 5) human common noun (‘the boy’, ‘a

woman’, etc.), 6) animate common noun (‘the dog’, ‘a sunflower’, ‘the ameba’, etc.) and 7) inanimate common

noun (‘the desk’, ‘love’, ‘dust’, etc.). Klaiman, Grammatical Voice, 120 (examples, Yoshihara’s). This explains

why English sentences as “John broke the vase” sound more natural than those as “The desk broke the vase.”

20 Klaiman, Grammatical Voice, 315.

21 The subject “my camera” in the most left example will be construed with the highest affectedness with a

physical and irreversible change, through the middle one with medium affectedness with a physical motion, to the

most right one with the lowest of all here without any physical change and motion. One may construe affectedness

of the speaker’s mental and emotional state, but that is not semantic but pragmatic, namely construed from context

or one’s assumption in his/her worldview, where his/her property being broken/stolen can be a negative event. It is

pragmatic and thus not inherent to semantics of the sentence, for such construed affectedness with the speaker can

be canceled with more contextual information or a different assumption: “my camera was broken in the accident, but

it was OK because it was already too old”; or “my camera was stolen in a train, but I am a billionaire, anyway.”

In English, affectedness is not the only semantic property to license a passive construction. What matters

more is cognitive processes called foregrounding and backgrounding, based on the opposition between figure and

ground in human cognition. Giving some passive examples, Saeed states: “This kind of choice of perspective

presumably depends on a speaker’s judgments of conversational salience. We can use the terms figure and ground

to describe this kind of linguistic perspective: if we call the situation described a scene, then the entity that the

speaker chooses to foreground is the figure and the background is the ground.” Saeed, Semantics, 156. He then

11

Transitivity is a semantic concept concerning the degree that the subject of a sentence

affects its object.22 Dan Slobin symbolically summarizes it as follows:

Transitivity can be seen as a continuum, in which clauses highest in transitivity

involve object nouns that are proper, human, animate, concrete, singular, count,

referential, and definite; and in which actions are willful, punctual, and concrete.23

Thus, transitivity is construed higher, say, in “my wife hit my daughter with a ladle on

purpose” than in “someone was trying to pick up a stone in my dream” or “I was thinking of

going there.” While it is a semantic concept, the transitive sentence is a syntactic construction

with one subject, and one object or more. Since some middle sentences in biblical Greek are

transitive, both syntactic transitivity and semantic transitivity should be noted.

So far, I have introduced some key linguistic concepts necessary to discuss the deponent

and the middle. I will now discuss some linguistic research on the middle and the deponent

among linguists and biblical scholars.

2. Discussion on the Middle and the Deponent

A. Suzanne Kemmer’s Typological Analysis of the Middle

Suzanne Kemmer’s comprehensive analysis of the middle voice is one that a student of

the subject should never avoid in his/her research.24 It is also cognitive, trying to describe the

shows that the passive in English foregrounds <theme: “This money was donated to the school”>, <percept: “The

UFO was seen by just two people”> and <recipient: “He was given a camera . . .”> [Underlines, Yoshihara’s].

22 Transitivity was originally proposed in the following article: Paul Hopper, and Sandra Thompson,

“Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse,” Language 56 (1980): 251-99.

23 Dan Slobin, “The Origins of Grammatical Encoding of Events,” in Studies in Transitivity, ed. Paul

Hopper and Sandra Thompson (New York: Academic, 1982), 410. In Hopper and Thompson’s own summary, it is

prototypically construed through the degrees of 10 parameters: “participants (two or more / one), kinesis (action /

nonaction), aspect (telic / atelic), punctuality (momentous / progressive), volitionality, affirmation (affirmative /

negative), mode (realis / irrealis), agency (high in potency / not), affectedness of the object (totally affected / not)

and individuation of the object (highly individualized or not).” Paul Hopper and Sandra Thompson, “Introduction,”

in Studies in Transitivity, ed. idem (New York: Academic, 1982), 3.

24 It is a comprehensive typological research of 30-plus languages in the world, which are both Indo-

European (IE) and non-IE. Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 271-2.

12

reflexive and the middle in a semantic property called “relative elaboration of events.” Kemmer

defines it while identifying her thesis as follows:

The main thesis . . . is that there is a coherent, although complex, linguistic

category subsuming many of the phenomena discussed under the name of middle

or other terms mentioned above, and this category receives grammatical

instantiation in many languages. . . . This general property . . . relative elaboration

of events, is the parameter along with the reflexive and the middle can be situated

as semantic categories intermediate in transitivity between one-participant and

two-participant events, and which in addition differentiates reflexive and middle

from one another. Thus middle forms part of a broad semantic-pragmatic domain

that includes not only the traditional voice categories (active and passive) but also

the semantic categories of transitive and intransitive.25

To establish what she aims, Kemmer lists up what she calls “situation types,”26 where

middle morphology appears cross-linguistically:

1) Grooming or body care; 2) Nontranslational motion; 3) Change in body

posture; 4) Indirect middle (self-benefactive middle); 5) Naturally reciprocal

events; 6) Translational motion; 7) Emotional middle / Emotive speech actions /

Other speech actions; 8) Cognitive middle; 9) Spontaneous events; and 10)

Logophoric middle27

Kemmer argue that these cross-linguistically found tendencies of middle morphology and

situational types28 are conceptually grounded through the property of “relative elaboration of

25 Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 3.

26 Observing “the patterns of mappings in human languages between semantic categories found to be

associated with the middle voice . . . and the language-specific formal categories that express them,” Kemmer calls

the semantic categories “situational types,” which “can be thought of as sets of situational or semantic/pragmatic

contexts that are systematically associated with a particular form of expression.” Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 7.

27 Kemmer’s examples are: 1) ‘wash,’ ‘get dressed,’ ‘shave,’ etc.; 2) ‘stretch one’s body,’ ‘turn,’ ‘bow,’

etc.; 3) ‘sit down,’ ‘kneel down,’ ‘lie down,’ ‘rise, get up,’ etc.; 4) ‘acquire,’ ‘lay claim to,’ ‘acquire oneself,’ ‘ask,

request,’ ‘take for oneself,’ etc.; 5) ‘meet,’ ‘embrace,’ ‘wrestle,’ ‘converse, agree,’ etc.; 6) ‘climb up,’ ‘go, leave,’

‘walk, stroll,’ ‘fly,’ etc.; 7) [Emotive middle]: ‘get a shock or fright,’ ‘be/become frightened,’ ‘be angry,’ ‘grieve,

mourn,’ etc. / [Emotive speech actions]: ‘complain,’ ‘lament,’ etc. / [Other speech actions]: ‘confess,’ ‘admit one’s

guilt,’ ‘confess,’ ‘be boastful,’ etc.; 8) ‘be cogitating,’ ‘think,’ ‘consider,’ ‘ponder, meditate,’ ‘believe,’ etc.; 9)

‘germinate, sprout,’ ‘grow,’ ‘come to a stop,’ ‘become,’ ‘change into,’ ‘recover,’ etc.; 10) ‘say,’ ‘see.’ Kemmer, The

Middle Voice, 16-20.

28 In fact, if this list by Kemmer is compared with Fortson’s list on Indo-European languages in general, a

similarity between them is easily recognized. Fortson says, “As a group these verbs do tend to express various

13

events” 1) by assuming “relative distinguishability of participants”29 and 2) by describing the

concerned event in an “event schema.”30 In the middle voice, Kemmer concludes that the degree

of distinguishability of participants is lower, with the lowest being “One-participant Event,” the

higher “Reflexive,” and the highest being “Two-participant Event.”31

Kemmer has developed a strong argument. She is successful in charting the middle and

the reflexive along transitivity and the active/passive and transitive/intransitive axis. Her cross-

linguistic and cross-historical studies has been a great contribution, as she says, “from the point

of view of our understanding of the relation of grammar to human conceptual organization.”32

As to deponents, Kemmer does not abolish the term but rather affirms it:

It was noted above that verbs in certain MM [i.e. middle-marked] classes tend to

have unmarked counterparts. The word “tend” is largely due to a single class of

exceptions to this generalization. These exceptions are notable because they are

quite widespread: in fact, I would venture to suggest, universal in middle-marking

languages. Rather idiosyncratically from the point of view of individual

languages, MM-only verbs in middle verb classes often lack unmarked

counterparts. I will term such MM-only verbs deponents.33

Kemmer thus acknowledges deponents as a universal subcategory among many middle-

marking languages.34 This argument shows that deponents constitute a universally-observed and

“internal” or intransitive notions like spatial movement, position of rest, emotions, sensory perception, speaking,

giving off sound or light, and changes of state.” Benjamin Fortson IV, Indo-European Language and Culture, 82.

29 Namely, “the degree to which a single physic-mental entity is conceptually distinguished into separate

participants, whether body vs. mind, or Agent vs. . . . Patient.” Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 66.

30 Event schemas, also called “causal chains” in cognitive linguistics, are illustrated, in a prototypical

transitive situation (e.g. “John hit Mary”), with two circles representing the “Initiator” (John) and the “Endpoint”

(Mary) of the event, and an arrow representing the “transmission of energy” (50) from the former to the latter. In a

prototypical reflexive situation (e.g. “John killed himself”), the two circles are connected with a dotted line, too, to

represent that the Initiator (John) and the Endpoint (himself) are identical (71). In a prototypical middle middle (e.g.

“John shaved”), there is only one circle representing both the Initiator (John) and the Endpoint (his face) and an

arrow leaving the circle coming back to it. ibid.

31 Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 73.

32 ibid.

33 Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 22 (italics, Kemmer’s; square brackets, Yoshihara’s).

34 Kemmer adds, “A crucial fact about deponents is that cross-linguistically they generally fall into the

14

established linguistic category without morphologically-related counterparts.

Typological work such as Kemmer’s has to be further examined with concrete examples

from more particular texts, as a research guide for a deeper understanding of the language and a

more universal generalization. Now we turn to Egbert Bakker’s study targeted to the

middle/passive in classical Greek.35

B. Egbert Bakker’s Analysis of the Middle with Transitivity and Aktionsart

Egbert Bakker tries to classify middle/passive situation types in classical Greek along

transitivity (lower (with the subject construed more typically with volitionality alone) < medium

(with agency, also) < higher (and with even causation)), along with middle/passive morphemes

(‘sa’ and ‘qh/h’) in light of 1) Aktionsart36 of verbs and 2) affectedness of subjects.37

Along with this, Bakker arranges Greek middles in the following way:

1) Objective intransitive 1-participant events; 2) Objective states; 3) Physical

processes; 4) Motion, emotion and cognition; 5) Volitionality and the -sa suffix;

6) Inherent reciprocals; 7) Affectedness and agency; 8) Transitive 2-participant

specific semantically-defined verb classes illustrated in examples (5)-(15),” and lists up 15 words from 8 languages

including Sanskrit and Latin, sister languages of classical Greek. Interestingly, these examples are widely

distributed through the situation types marked by middle morphology, quoted above, such as “grooming or body

care,” “nontranslational action,” “emotional middle,” “cognition middle,” etc. The words are ones with English

meanings such as “forget, fear, get sick, become warm, wash oneself (without completely undressing), be happy,

turn green, die, sit down, . . . squat, think, reflect, believe, be angry.” Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 22-3.

35 Egbert Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” in Voice, ed. Barbara Fox and Paul Hopper (Amsterdam:

John Benjamins, 1993): 23-47.

36 Aktionsart, in Bakker’s words, “acts as a constraint on aspectual morphosyntax in Greek in that the

question as to whether the aorist or the present/imperfect form of a given verb is the normal (most frequent) case

depends on the event-type.” Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” 26. He then continues that, because of such

“event-types like ‘die’ or ‘arrive’, for example, are inherently punctual . . . verbs denoting these event-types in

discourse are overwhelmingly aorist.” ibid.

37 Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” 24-6. Bakker’s position looks radical in light of Greek

pedagogy because he proposes that “sa” shows or admits high transitivity and “qh/h” suppresses the subject’s

affectedness. He also presents each verb in his examples in the infinitive in its most unmarked aspect and voice,

namely in the present or the aorist. Although these more cutting-edge issues are beyond the scope of the current

article, see a few examples below. They are worth of future and further consideration.

15

events; 9) Causatives (Physical processes; Motion); 10) Patient-directed action;

and 11) ‘kill’38

Bakker’s argument is stimulating. The classes of verbs arranged above show: 1) their

middle forms are distributed through 2/3-10; 2) inherent affectedness of the subject is construed

through 3-10; 3) the -sa- morpheme showing high transitivity is observed through 5-9; and 4)

the -qh- morpheme suppressing subject’s affectedness is observed split through 3-5 and 8-10.39

This symmetricity even elegantly shows a close interaction between the events’ transitivity and

the subjects’ affectedness (semantics) in 1) no middle forms (morphology) in the lowest

transitivity, 2) middle forms in lower transitivity, 3) middle/passive forms in higher transitivity

and 4) no middle/passive forms in the highest transitivity,40 together with the symmetric choices

of the morphemes (morphology: alterating along transitivity: “qh”-“sa”-“qh”).

This model of Bakker is highly complex, and it is based on classical Greek, linguistic

stock 200-500 years before biblical Greek. A detailed examination of his analysis in light of the

latter is desired as a future task, too. What matters to my current discussion is that middle verbs

are observed in situation types through (2)-(10) in different fashions. In Class (3), “physical

process,” for example, both construals of durative and punctual are observed: the former is with

38 Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” 28-41. Some of Bakker’s examples are: 1) ‘(ajpo)qanei:n’:

‘die’, ‘pesei:n’: ‘fall’, etc.; 2) ‘basileuvein’: ‘rule as king’, ‘douleuvein’: ‘be a slave’, etc.; 3) ‘fuvesqai’: ‘grow’,

‘thvkesqai’: ‘melt’, etc.; 4) ‘klivnesqai’: ‘lean’, ‘trevpesqai’: ‘turn’, ‘h”desqai’: ‘rejoice’, ‘boulhqhvnai’: ‘want’,

etc.; 5) ‘koima:sqai’: ‘be asleep’, ‘pauvesqai’, ‘come to an end’, etc.; 6) ‘ajgwnivzesqai’: ‘comepte’, ‘filei:sqai’: ‘kiss’, etc.; 7) ‘louv(e)sqai’: ‘wash’, ‘ajleivfesqai’: ‘anoint oneself’, etc.; 8) ‘poiei:n’: ‘make’, ‘paraskeuavzein’:

‘prepare’, etc.; 9) “physical processes”: ‘fuvein’: ‘grow’; ‘te:kein’: ‘melt’, etc.; “motion”: ‘ajpallavttein’: ‘remove’,

‘klivnein’: ‘make lean, bend’, etc.; 10) ‘poliorkei:n’: ‘besiege’, ‘kolavzein’: ‘punish’, etc.; and 11) ‘(ajpo)kteivnen’:

‘kill’. They are originally in Roman alphabets, converted by Yoshihara.

39 Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” 41-4.

40 Bakker says, “In fact, regular passive form of ‘kill’ in Ancient Greek is the very verb ‘die’

((apo)thaneîn). In other words, the effect produced on the patient in the most transitive event is identical to what

happens to the only participant in the least transitive event.” Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” 41.

Rijksbaron points out the same phenomenon: “In the case of some transitive verbs passing meaning is not, or not

always, expressed by passive forms, but by lexical means, i.e. by active verbs that may have passive meaning. This

holds e.g. for ajpokteivw ‘kill’: ‘be killed’ = ajpoqnh/vskw (lit. ‘die’), not *ajpokteivnomai.” He adds that ‘uJpov’ is used

equivalent to ‘by’ in English. Rijksbaron, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek, 139.

16

more subject affectedness: with a plant, say, gradually growing; and the latter, with less subject

affectedness, with the plant to grow as though it were a punctual/telic event. The former is thus

expressed as a middle deponent due to the subject affectedness, namely as ‘fuvesqai’: ‘be

growing’; 41 and the latter, without middle morphology, realizing in the active, namely as

‘fuh:nai’, ‘grow’.42 In Class (8), “Transitive 2-participant events,” in contrast, the event type

shows less subject affectedness: most of the verbs are thus expressed in the active, say,

‘paraskeuavzein/paraskeu:sai nau:n’: ‘be preparing/prepare a ship’; and, if the middle dares to

be used, it renders an additional sense of beneficiary (Kemmer’s “indirect middle”), say,

‘paraskeuavzesqai/paraskeusavsqai nau:n’: ‘be preparing/prepare a ship (for oneself)’.43

As Bakker’s discussion shows, deponency is entwined in the whole voice, transitive and

aspect system of classical Greek. There are semantic motivations behind both the fact that they

are in the middle and the fact that there are no corresponding active forms. 44 Together

41 Traditionally parsed, present middle (deponent). The corresponding active ‘fuvein’ (i.e. ‘fuvw’,

traditionally) functions not as intransitive any more but as transitive, meaning ‘being growing (something)’, which is

thus categorized in Class (9), “Causative.” Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” 30-2, 38-9.

42 Traditionally parsed: (2nd) aorist passive, but remember that ‘-nai’ is categorized as an active infinitive

morpheme. Mounce, The Morphology of Biblical Greek, 148. This kind of aorist analysis will lead to our

understanding of the “Gnomic Aorist” - aorist but not past. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 562.

The whole discussion on Class (3) is on Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” 31-2. Note that the

present and aorist opposition is not discussed in the time opposition between “now” (the present) for the former and

“then” (the past) for the latter but progressive or punctual, atelic or telic (end-denoted), etc., in his discussion based

on the Aktionsart.

43 Bakker, “Voice, Aspect and Aktionsart,” 34-6. It is interesting to see in his discussion on Case (6),

“Affectedness and agency”that one of its three subclasses, “Goal profits or is inherently unaffected,” consists of all

middle deponents: some of Bakker’s examples are ‘spare,’ ‘accept,’ ‘heal,’ ‘imitate, impersonate,’ ‘count,’ ‘use,’

‘obtain’ (35).

Also suggestive is what Bakker says after his discussion of the type: “A borderline case between this group

and the next [Class (8): Transitive 2-participant events] is constituted by verbs of perception. A perception event

can be constituted either as a relationship between an agent and a goal (patient) or as an experiencer and a source. In

the latter case there is inherent affectedness, of course, and, inevitably, middle marking; in the former case there is

active morphology. In the oldest, Homeric Greek, both construals may be freely expressed, by the active and middle

form, respectively. In Attic Greek, on the other hand, this freedom is grammaticalized away: most verbs of

perception are active (e.g. o”ran, ivdei:n ‘see’), except in the future” (36) (square brackets, Yoshihara’s).

44 Kemmer says, also: “The prevalence of deponents in middle lexical semantic classes, too, is readily

17

considering Kemmer’s maintenance of deponency and her report that deponents constitute a

large subgroup in the Greek verbal system,45 I conclude that recognizing what is equivalent to

deponency is still significant in grammatical description of classical Greek and thus also

Hellenistic (biblical) stock. With this conclusion from these linguistics studies in mind, let us

now turn to what biblical scholars discuss on the deponent in biblical Greek.

C. Daniel Wallace’ Analysis of New Testament Examples

Daniel Wallace describes the middle in the NT in the following categories:

1) Direct middle; 2) Redundant middle; 3) Indirect middle; 4) Causative middle;

4) Permissive middle; 5) Reciprocal middle; and 6) Deponent middle46

Wallace’ classification of the NT middle from his detailed examination of concrete

examples in the more coherent collection of texts from a certain limited period of time, largely

echoes with Kemmer’s and Bakker’s more general but technical classifications in classical

Greek. As mentioned in Introduction, however, a problem is that Wallace places the deponent

middle in parallel to the other classes. This is at least misleading because his classification of the

others is mostly semantic,47 but his definition of the deponent is a combination of morphology

explainable: deponents appear precisely in those classes which are semantically middle, i.e. in which the middle

meaning of low elaboration of events is inherently part of the verb.” Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 22.

45 Kemmer points out: “For a well-described language, the number of deponents cited by grammar writers

can be quite large, as in Hungarian, Classical Greek, and Latin.” After mentioning the fact that one study lists “over

a hundred for the period of the Roman Republic” with regard to Latin, she suspects that “deponents in general form

a significant proportion of the MM [middle-marked] verbs in a language, and cases in which few or no deponents are

cited are due to incomplete data collection.” ibid (square brackets, Yoshihara’s).

46 Some of Wallace’ examples are: 1) (a.k.a. Reflexive or Direct Reflexive) e.g. ‘ajphvgxato’: ‘he hanged

himself’ (Matt 27:5), etc.; 2) ‘uJpokrinomevnouV eJautouvV’: ‘who made themselves’ (Luke 20:20), etc.; 3) (a.k.a.

Indirect Reflexive, Benefactive, Intensive, Dynamic middle) e.g. ‘ajpekrivnato’: ‘he answered (in his own defense)’

(Matt 27:12), etc.; 4) e.g. ‘ejbaptivsato’: ‘he has himself washed’ (Luke 11:38), etc.; 4) e.g. ‘ajpogravyasqai’: ‘to be

enrolled’ (Luke 2:5), etc.; 5) e.g. ‘sunebouleuvsanto’: ‘they resolved together’ (Matt 26:4), etc.; and 6) e.g.

‘a{llomai’, ‘ajpokrivnomai’, ‘bouvlomai’, etc. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 414-30.

47 In fact, Wallace’ Redundant middle is also a category from a consideration of its syntactic property with

reflexive and reciprocal pronouns (‘eJautou:, -h:V’, ‘ajllhvlwn’, etc.), and thus not a purely semantic category.

Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 418-9.

18

and semantics.48 Although this discrepancy has been traditionally accepted in biblical studies

especially in pedagogical contexts where Wallace’ compendium plays a significant role, it is not

consistent and coherent as a linguistic analysis. This is especially true when it comes to his

emphasis that “the middle force is absent”49 among the deponents. Wallace’ definition of

“force” is not obvious. He denies that the deponent has “a middle force” because he says that

one “should not be able to see a middle force”50 in a deponent verb. However, he probably

construe higher agency with more volition with the subject of what he calls “true deponents.”51

As was shown in Kemmer’s and especially Bakker’s analyses, however, these verbs bear

middle semantics regardless of the level of transitivity partially construed with different levels of

agency: higher agency construed with the subject does not necessarily conflict with the inherent

middle semantics of the concerned situational type, or, roughly said, the meaning of the

concerned verb. In other words, while the subject clearly has a stronger volition or even a strong

determination with higher agency, the event of, say, “go” (“poreuvomai”) is “translational” and

the subject is affected location-wise from the event. In fact, Wallace himself questions about one

of his examples of true deponents here (‘proseuvcomai’, ‘pray’), pointing out that “it takes little

imagination to see a true (indirect) middle force to the verb. . .”52 His problem is his confusion

of subject’s higher agency, which he probably and misleadingly calls “active force,” and the

48 “A deponent middle verb is one that has no active form [morphological] for a particular principal part in

Hellenistic Greek, and one whose force in that principal part is evidently active [semantic].” Wallace, Greek

Grammar Beyond Basics, 428 (square brackets, Yoshihara’s).

49 Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 429 (italics, Wallace’). He also presents some grammarians’

interpretations of deponency, namely something being laid aside, in relation to “the middle force”: “But other

grammarians, seeing that the thing laid aside is the middle (or passive) force, not the active form, are content with

this term as truly descriptive of this category” (428: italics, Wallace’).

50 Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 430.

51 ibid. Namely, ‘ajpokrivnomai’: ‘answer’, ‘bouvlomai’: ‘want’, ‘givnomai’: ‘become’, ‘ejrgavzomai’: ‘work’,

‘e[rcomai’: ‘come’, ‘poreuvomai’: ‘go’, and so forth.

52 ibid.

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middle semantics inherent to the verb or the event, which is universally observed by linguists

like Kemmer and Bakker. Deponents are in middle forms just because their semantics is middle,

which is exactly why there is no corresponding active forms for them, indeed. Their semantics is

simply middle, which is reflected in their forms. Different linguistic levels or categories should

not be easily mixed together in a linguistic analysis.

D. Johnathan Pennington’s Question and Neva Miller’s Suggestion

Johnathan Pennington 53 has guided the debate into a more desirable direction.

Challenging the traditional definition of deponency,54 he asks a right question: “the question

about what it means for a verb to be “active in meaning.””55 Although he does not answer this

question clearly, he correctly points out that scholars and students’ quick seeing Greek through

their English knowledge has been part of the reason of their misunderstanding of the

deponents.56 In fact, his judgment reflects the reality:

Most if not all of the so-called “deponent” verbs in Koine Greek can be seen to

have a true middle sense (usually indirect) and thus the definition of deponency -

“active in meaning but middle/passive in form” - does not apply. These verbs are

in fact middle in form and in meaning.57

As Pennington highly praises in his article, Neva Miller58 is with a similar orientation.

Contending on the deponent that “we need to examine each such verb for its own sake and allow

53 Jonathan Pennington, “Deponency in Koine Greek,” Trinity Journal 24 (2003): 55-76.

54 “Middle or passive in form but active in meaning,” e.g. Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek, 150.

55 Pennington, “Deponency in Koine Greek,” 61.

56 “Careful thought, however, reveals that in the majority of cases the meaning is “active, to be sure” only

from the perspective of English.” Pennington, “Deponency in Koine Greek,” 62.

57 Pennington, “Deponency in Koine Greek,” 69.

58 Neva Miller, “A Theory of Deponent Verbs,” in Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, ed.

Timothy Friberg, Barbara Friberg, and Neva F. Miller (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 2000): 423-30.

20

it to speak for itself,”59 she classifies deponent verbs in the NT into the following categories:

1) Reciprocity (Positive interaction, Negative interaction, and Positive and

negative communication; 2) Reflexivity; 3) Self-involvement (Intellectual

activities, Emotional states, and Volitional activities; 4) Self-interest; 5)

Receptivity; 6) Passivity; and 7) State, Condition.60

Miller’s classification looks overlapping with all the others’ above. She acknowledges

that the deponent is middle in meaning, too, and suggests to abolish the concept of deponency.61

E. How, Then, Should Deponency Be Treated?

Following the discussion above, what shall we do with the concept of deponency and

how shall we deal with deponents? I would like to suggest the following. First, I think that we

can maintain a concept like deponency. Yet, I would suggest a change in nomenclature. As

introduced in Introduction, quoting Taylor, and, as many mention the same above, the term

“deponency” is misleading because the term seems to assume that all deponents originally had

active counterparts in their developments. Deponents were middle in nature, and it is possible

for them to have been consistently middle for a long period of time.62

Of course, as Fortson says,63 many things are not clear especially in a much earlier

period of the history of Greek. As Kemmer discusses, it will be true that the middle was

59 Miller, “A Theory of Deponent Verbs,” 426.

60 Miller, “A Theory of Deponent Verbs,” 427-9. The given terms are all Miller’s.

61 “If the verbs in the above classes are understood as true middles and if active forms could not have

expressed such concepts then it may be that categorizing such verbs as deponent is no longer relevant.” Miller, “A

Theory of Deponent Verbs,” 429.

62 See the next section for some examples.

63 However, one should note what Fortson states: “The difference in meaning between these two voices

[active and middle] in PIE [proto-Indo-European] is not fully clear . . . But in many other cases, the distinction

between active and middle inflection was purely a formal one: there were some verbs that inflected only in the

active and others only in the middle, without clear differences in meaning.” Fortson, Indo-European Language and

Culture, 82 (square brackets, Yoshihara’s: Fortson’s “formal” here is equivalent to ‘morphological’).

21

grammaticalized during a certain historical period.64 Or, rather, many words were under the

process of grammaticalization.65 This is why, Taylor’s and Pennington’s suggestions are both

appropriate: in the former’s words, “We should base our decision on extant forms on all of

Hellenistic Greek, as well as the LXX, not just on the NT and subsequent literature.”66 I agree,

recognizing the importance of studying the Greek of the NT in light of Hellenistic Greek.

However, I do not stick to a strict definition of the deponent, namely, as a verb with no

active form, for what matters more is that deponents are construed with middle semantics in the

minds of the speaker/writer and hearer/reader. Once “middle-ness” of a so-called deponent is

construed, the lack of its active counterpart is not important, especially for exegetical work,67

even though it is important for linguistic description: for exegesis, it will be enough for one to

know the general tendency of the frequently used voice of the verb. Along this line, Taylor’s

suggestion of abolishing deponency, especially in lexicography of verbs, is amenable, too.68

I would rather propose to maintain the concept of deponency in a different term for an

educational purpose. Paul Westney, professor of Universitat Tubingen, Germany says in his

64 Kemmer, The Middle Voice, 237-9. In fact, the fifth chapter of her book deals with the “diachronic

developments” of middle systems (151-200).

65 Thus, what Wallace says is appropriate except the opposition between “deponent” and “true middle”:

“At the same time it must be admitted that the scarcity of some active forms in the Koine period might suggest that,

for one author, the middle form is deponent while for another it is a true middle. As with lexical stock, the

morphological stock of various writers at a given period cannot be presumed to be identical. Much work needs to be

done in this area.” Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 429.

Grammaticalization is “the process whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic

contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical

functions.” Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Grammaticalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University,

1993), xv.

66 Pennington, “Deponency in Koine Greek,” 72. In fact, as he mentions, his suggestion here is also

through his reflection of what Taylor says in “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” 176.

67 Thus, BHGNT’s suggestion to abolish deponency concerning exegesis is appropriate. Culy, Luke, xii.

However, Culy’s identification of deponency as “a syntactic category” is incorrect, as has been discussed. It is

morphological and semantic.

68 “If a verb occurs regularly in the active, then that is indicated by the use of a present active lexical

form/headword; and if not, then the middle/passive form is used for verbs occurring in the middle. This will serve

to indicate whether the voice is active or middle.” Taylor, “Deponency and Greek Lexicography,” 175.

22

article in applied linguistics, especially on pedagogical grammar:

To achieve optimal pedagogical rules (whatever they might be), it would be

necessary to have access to (a) the best description of the language, (b) relevant

psycholinguistic criteria that could determine how learners (whether considered

collectively or individually) are best helped in acquisition and (c) a means of

deriving appropriate pedagogical formulations from this information.69

The issue of deponency concerns all of these three. The grammatical phenomena around

it have to be best described so that accurate information may be processed for good pedagogical

material; they should be well-placed in the whole grammatical system for the student to be

conceptually helped as observable phenomena in connection to what he/she already knows; and

they should be well-presented for him/her to formulate the new knowledge for integration into a

better whole. Most textbooks of classical Greek today introduce the deponent when or after the

present active is introduced. The traditional formula - “middle or passive in form but active in

meaning” - has thus functioned well, whether or not it is appropriate as a linguistic description.

As was discussed above, the formula has two problems: 1) the definition of the “active”

meaning, and 2) the nomenclature of “deponent.” First, I have discussed that the meaning of the

deponent is not active but middle and that grammarians’ judgments for active are due to their

misunderstandings of the nature of active meaning, attributable to their construal of subject’s

stronger agency. Deponents maintain their middle semantics, independently of the construal of

the subjects. Second, it is true that the label “deponent,” originally derived from Latin, meaning

“lay aside,” is inappropriate if there are no corresponding active forms historically, and because

deponents have never laid aside their middle semantics.

I would like to suggest a term - “DMP verb.” If “middle-only inflective verb”70 is used,

69 Paul Westney, “Rules and Pedagogical Grammar,” in Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar, ed.

Terence Odlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994), 81.

70 Klaiman, Grammatical Voice, 83.

23

it has to be proven that there is truly no active form. While such a proof throughout all extant

Hellenistic literature is desired academically, such a level of accuracy is not required for

language pedagogy at earlier levels. “Media Tantum” 71 does not sound student-friendly.

“DMP,” a simple abbreviation of “deponent/middle/passive,” however, reflects the traditional

idea of deponents, and captures and conveys such a general tendency in preferred voices enough

for the student to use as a “psycholinguistic” label for him/her temporal “formulation”72 in

understanding, memorization and practice. The more smoothly this introductory period is

overcome, the more smoothly his/her cognitive gestalt will be resolved and integrated.

In this section, I have introduced some fundamental linguistic concepts necessary for

more valid linguistic analysis of the deponent. I have also introduced a cognitive and typological

linguistic research on the middle by Kemmer and a cognitive research of classical Greek by

Bakker. I have then pointed out the confusion of levels of analysis in traditional biblical studies

and affirmed the more appropriately-directed discussions by Pennington and Miller. Finally, I

have discussed the problems of the nomenclature of “deponent” and suggested an alternative,

“DMP-verb,” especially for pedagogical purposes. In the next section, I will discuss a DMP-

verb found in 1 Peter, ‘ajpogivnomai’: ‘die’.

3. Application to a DMP-Verb in 1 Peter

A. DMP-Verbs in 1 Peter

In my counting of both indicative and non-indicative verbs,73 1 Peter approximately

71 ibid.

72 Westney, “Rules and Pedagogical Grammar,” 81.

73 The Greek texts adopted for this analysis are of the following two resources. Matthew Black, et al ed.,

The Greek New Testament, 3d ed. (Stuttgart, Germany: United Bible Societies, 1997; Libronix); and Richard

Goodrich, and Albert Lukaszewski, A Reader’s Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2004).

24

contains 280-290 verbs, and 70-75 middle/passive forms are attested among them (approx.

25%).74 DMP-verbs, formerly called deponents, are 11 (17 total counts).75 There are five other

verbs, which Goodrich and Lukaszewski defines as deponents but Liddell Scott (LS, henceforth)

and Bauer (BDAG, henceforth) mostly register in the active (seven total counts).76

A lexicon survey shows that the active/middle77 oppositions among the five verbs are

attested as early as 5C and/or 8C BC. In other words, the middle forms with middle meanings

had been already established around 500 or 850 years before the NT.78 The point is that the

The Lexicons used in addition to the glosses in Goodrich and Lukaszewski are the following three. Henry

George Liddell et al. ed., A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996; Libronix); Johannes Louw and

Eugene Nida. ed., Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996;

Libronix); and Walter Bauer et al. ed., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian

Literature, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000; Libronix).

74 According to Rijksbaron, the middle/passive ratio in Herodotus is 39% and Plato 33%. Rijksbaron, The

Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek, 142. Interestingly, according to T. Givón’s “frequency

distribution of active and passive clauses in written English,” the passive ratios in the academic, fiction, news, sports

text types are respectively, 18%, 9%, 8% and 4%.” Givón, Functionalism and Grammar, 45. Considering the

frequent use of the impersonal passive (“it is said that . . . ,” etc.) in academic discourse in contemporary English,

this may show how much the middle/passive in classical Greek bore so-called “active meaning” if translated in

English, as Pennington says: “Just because the gloss in English looks like an active meaning this does not mean it

was so for the Greek speaker.” Pennington, “Deponency in Koine Greek,” 61 (italics, Pennington). The traditional

formula - ‘middle/passive in form but active in meaning’ is understandable in its own traditional nomenclature and

logic.

75 ‘promartuvromai’ (1:11), ‘givnomai’ (5x: 1:15, 2:7, 3:6, 3:13, 4:12, 5:3), ‘prosevrcomai’ (2:4),

‘ajpogivnomai’ (2:24), ‘ajpekdevcomai’ (3:20), ‘parevrcomai’ (4:3), ‘katergavzomai’ (4:3), ‘ejgkombovomai’ (5:5),

‘wjruvomai’ (5:12), ‘logivzomai’ (5:12) and ‘ajspavzomai’ (2x: 5:13, 5:14).

76 ‘geuvomai’ (2:3), ‘strateuvomai’ (2:11), ‘fobevomai’ (3x: 2:17, 3:6, 3:14), ‘poreuvomai’ (3:19, 3:22, 4:3)

and ‘a[rcomai’ (4:17).

77 ‘fobevomai’ is considered as a passive verb, though.

78 Fortson defines the Classical period in 480-323 BC. Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture, 223.

He also says, “Near the beginning of this time [early eighth century BC] is probably when the earliest known Greek

literary works - the two surviving Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey - reached their present form” (237) (square

brackets, Yoshihara’s).

LS lists the active ‘poreuvw’ (‘make to go, carry, convey’) and ‘poreuvomai’ (‘go, walk, march’) with

examples all from 5C BC or before. LS, 1449. The active however, seems to decline later, for LS does not quote

later examples and BDAG registers it as a DMP in my term. BDAG, 853.

LS also registers ‘a[rcw’ as ‘begin’ both in the active and the middle, but ‘rule’ only in the active. All of

them are from the 8C BC. The active/middle flexibility may reflect a property of Proto-Indo-European language or

could be attributed to the difference between poetry and prose. This kind of phenomenon does not seem to have

been only with ‘a[rcw’. Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture, 82. The active and the middle

25

middle usage has such a long history.

B. An Exegesis of ‘ajpogivnomai’: ‘die’ in 2:24

Having discussed some historical situation as above, I would like to focus on a DMP

attested in 1 Peter 2:24, ‘ajpogivnomai’: ‘die’, in the rest of this article. The Greek text is as

follows: “ὃς τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν αὐτὸς ἀνήνεγκεν ἐν τῷ σώματι αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ τὸ ξύλον, ἵνα ταῖς

ἁμαρτίαις ἀπογενόμενοι τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ ζήσωμεν, οὗ τῷ μώλωπι ἰάθητε” (USB3/NA26).79

This verse is significant: Karen Jobes points out that “First Peter 2:21–25 forms the heart

of 1 Peter’s Christology, joining ethics to theology in a profoundly convincing way”80 and:

The identity of Jesus Christ as the Suffering Servant poignantly yet enigmatically

portrayed in Isaiah 53 is well known in Christian tradition. What may be more

surprising is that the church owes this insight to the apostle Peter alone, for it is

only here in the NT that Christ’s passion is discussed in terms of Isaiah’s

prophecy of the Suffering Servant.81

The majority (22 out of 28) of translations in English and other languages available to me

render 2:24 with “die” (e.g. “so that we might die to sins” (NIV))82 while the others are not (e.g.

distinguished later might have been a parallel existence of active forms from different social or regional dialects, and

the latter might have been grammaticalized to the middle later.

LS says, for example, that “in the Homerus Epicus, the active is more frequent; and in the Attic prose, the

middle is more frequent, especially where personal action is emphasized.” LS, 254 (Because it adopts a lot of

symbols, I have supplied some words here even taking a form of direct quotation for convenience). This description

cannot prove a shift from the older active usage to the more recent middle usage (thus the active meaning was not

“laid aside”), for the hymns or poems are “a mixture of forms from different dialects and from different

chronological stages.” Homerus Epicus, “the thirty three so-called Homeric hymns” are “of the works of the first

Greek author whose name we know, Hesiod (late 8C BC). Some of the Homeric hymns contain important ancient

material, but all of them were composed much later than the two epics [later than 8C BC].” Fortson, Indo-European

Language and Culture, 223 (square brackets, Yoshihara’s).

79 The quoted text from UBS3/NA26 for technical convenience is identical to NA27 (underline,

Yoshihara’s). The antecedent of the relative pronoun “o{V” is “CristovV” in 2:21. The text problem in NA27 is only

an alteration of ‘hJmw:n’ (text) and “uJmw:n” (P72, B and a few more), which is negligible for the purpose of this

article. “ajpogenovmenoi” (aorist middle participle nominative masculine plural), taking “tai:V aJmartivaiV” as a dative

object, modifies “zhvswmen” (aorist active subjunctive 1st person plural).

80 Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2005; Libronix), 192. 81 ibid. 82 AV, Darby, ASB, RSV, NKJV, NIV, GNB, NLT, ESV, Louw & Nida, Lexham, Vulgate (Latin, 1969),

26

“free from sins” (NRSV)).83 However, the opposition between the two groups of translations are

not so significant because at least several commentators point out that they are almost

equivalent.84 In fact, J. Ramsey Michaels’ comment speaks a lot:

The contrast with ζήσωμεν, “live,” suggests the translation “die,” a legitimate

rendering of ἀπογίνεσθαι . . . , but Peter is less bold than Paul in his use of

metaphor (cf. his tendency to add to his metaphors such qualifiers as “in your

mind” in 1:13 or “spiritual” in 2:2, 5). In place of ἀποθνῃσκειν, the common verb

for “die,” ἀπογίνεθαι serves Peter as a euphemism, with the meaning “to be

away” or “to depart.”85

This metaphorical usage of ‘ajpogivnomai’ is attested in Thuchydides (5C BC) 86 and

Josephus (AD 1C),87 in parallel to several other examples literally meaning ‘die,’ listed both in

LS and BDAG. It is obvious that Peter does not mean his readers’ literal death and, if it is

understood by them, one’s choice between the two renderings does not seem much. Stylistically,

‘die’ is preferred, I suppose, in light of Isaiah 53, alluded and partially quoted in this passage, as

Jobes points out above. It is preferred, too, in contrast with ‘live’.88

for French versions (all, Libronix), one French version, one Brazilian Portuguese version, one Modern Greek

version, one Chinese version and one Japanese version.

83 They are: “be rid of” (Message); “free from sin” (NAB); “free from sins” (NRSV); “cease from sinning”

(NET) (all, Libronix); “tapno mawayawayaantay iti pannakabalin ti basol” (“so that we may be free from sin”:

Ilocano Popular Version (Philippines)) and “tsumi o hanare” (“getting away from sin(s)”: Shinkaiyaku Version

(Japan)).

84 G. W. Blenkin, ed., The First Epistle General of Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1914;

Libronix), 64; I. Howard Marshall, 1 Peter (Downers Grove, Ilinois: InterVarsity, 1991; Libronix), Kenneth S.

Wuest, Wuest’s Word Studies from the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997; Libronix), 1 Peter,

68; 1 Pe 2:21; J. Ramsey Michaels, 1 Peter (Dallas: Word, 1998; Libronix), 148; David A. Case and David W.

Holdren, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude (Indianapolis, Indiana: Wesleyan, 2006; Libronix), 85; Dubis, 1 Peter, 80. On

the other hand, the only commentator that does not mention dying but just saying “put away sins” is: M. Eugene

Boring, “Narrative Dynamics in First Peter,” in Reading First Peter with New Eyes, ed. Robert L. Webb and Betsy

Bauman-Martin (London: T&T Clark, 2007; Libronix), 31.

85 Michaels, 1 Peter, 148.

86 “Thucydides [cp. 1, 39, 3 τῶν ἁμαρτημάτων ἀπογενόμενοι, in the sense ‘have no part in’].” BDAG, 108

(underline, Yoshihara’s).

87 “MwusevoV . . . ejx ajnqrwvpwn ajpogegonovtoV” (“Moses was taken away from men . . . ”). Flavius

Josephus, “Antiquitatum Iudaicarum,” in Flavii Iosephi Opera, vol. 1, ed. Benedictus Niese (Berolini: apvd

Weidmannos, 1888– ; Libronix), 292 (translation, Yoshihara’s).

88 Dubis, 1 Peter, 80.

27

Dubis provides a syntactic support to this choice, too: “The dative ἁμαρτίαις, since one

would expect a genitive of separation if the first meaning applied here.”89 This seems plausible

because all the syntactic data in LS suggests that the verb ‘ajpogivnomai’ takes a genitive noun, as

Dubis says, or prepositions of separation, ‘ejk’ or ‘ajpov’, the latter of which is redundant, though.

The reference dative “tai:V aJmartivaiV” seems to be rare, and thus, to fit better with ‘die’.

What matters to me is then the relation between the participle ‘ajpogenovmenoi’ and the

main verb of the ‘iJna’ clause - ‘zhvswmen’. In Daniel Wallace’ terms and definitions, the

participle here can be construed “adverbial (cause)”90 or “attendant circumstance.”91 Although

none of available translations uses ‘because’ - the explicit conjunctive for cause, as to the former,

a half of them (14 out of 28) explicitly render that our dying/being away from sins has been

already dealt with in Jesus’ death and tell that the “purpose-result”92 of his death is for us to live

to righteousness. 93 As to the latter translations, on the other hand, the participle and the

subjunctive verb are conveniently put together in the purpose-result clause in parallel and in a

sequence.94 Those translations are largely due to stylistic convenience for many languages to

avoid the complexity of having a participle or a further subordinate clause inside a subordinate

clause (lead by “so that” in English). 95

89 ibid. Obviously, “the first meaning” here means ‘be separated,’ ‘get away’, etc.

90 Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 631-2.

91 Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 640-5.

92 Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 473-4.

93 For example, “that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness” (NKJV); and “so that, free from

sins, we might live for righteousness” (NRSV) (underlines, Yoshihara’s).

94 For example, “so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness” (NIV) (underline, Yoshihara’s).

95 Interestingly, most available translations in Romantic languages, where the participle is stylistically

acceptable (or even preferred for formality), translate the Greek participle in a participle: e.g. “peccatis morui”

28

Although Bible translation has to consider aesthetics for ceremonial purposes with

exegetical accuracy,96 I prefer the causal construal of the participle: thus, Christ bore our sins,

with the result and purpose of which - because we have already died to the sins - we may live

(the whole life (aorist)) to righteousness. This is because it emphasizes on Christ’s perfect and

finished work on the cross more clearly, reflecting the theology of the alluded Isaiah 53.

In the attendant circumstance construal, on the other hand, we die to the sins (the whole

life (aorist, in Wallace’s term, “Constative” 97)), too, as well as live to righteousness. Therefore,

the question to ask is - do we have to die to sins in Peter’s perspective when we walk to

righteousness? Unfortunately, the collocation of ‘die’ and ‘sin’ in this theological sense is not

found in 1 Peter other than 2:24. In the NT, Paul discusses it in Rom 6:2 and 7, in both of which

he states or assumes that ‘dying’ is already done. This construal is thus not preferred except

from the stylistic reason and circumstance discussed above though it is obvious that more

theological discussion for integration in NT theology is necessary.

Finally, the two ‘dying’ verbs are different in Bakker’s classification: active

‘ajpoqnhvskw’ belongs to “Objective intransitive” while middle ‘ajpogivnomai’ to “affectedness

and agency.” The middle voice of ‘ajpogivnomai’ is significant in this context. Yes, we are the

ones to die. But Peter’s choice of words emphasizes on our affectedness. Peter was perhaps not

“less bold than Paul” to use “euphemism.”98 We are dead to sins because Christ died for us. I

suggest that the middle semantic of ‘ajpogivnomai’ here eloquently speaks this mystery of

believers’ death to sins.

(Vulgate); “morts aux péchés” (French, Segond); “mortos para os peccados” (Brazilian Portuguese, Ferreira), etc.

96 For example, NIV was translated to be “suitable for public and private reading, teaching, preaching,

memorizing and liturgical use.” The Committee on Bible Translation, “Preface to the New International Version,”

in Zondervan NIV Study Bible, Fully Revised (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2002), xi.

97 Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond Basics, 644.

98 Michaels, 1 Peter, 148.

29

III. CONCLUSION

In this article, I introduced some fundamental concepts of (cognitive) linguistics so that

middle study might be helped in this interdisciplinary endeavor with NT studies. They are

morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, subject, object, thematic roles, prototype, agency,

affectedness and transitivity. I introduced Kemmer’s typological, functional and cognitive

analysis of the middle voice, and Bakker’s semantic analysis of the middle/passive verbs in

classical Greek. Their contentions were compared with those of Wallace, Pennington and Miller.

I then concluded that the traditional concept of deponency is still helpful in language

pedagogy, even if it has shortcomings for detailed and coherent linguistic study. I suggested an

alternative term, “DMP-verb.” I also argued that middle forms that have been traditionally

categorized as deponents are indeed middle in their semantics with morphological realization,

and that it was this reason, without active semantics, that there cannot be found corresponding

active forms. Finally, I tried applying this exegetical framework of the middle voice with a more

linguistic orientation, to a verb attested in 1 Peter, ‘ajpogivnomai’, in 2:24, and pointed out some

semantic and pragmatic significance of the verb’s being a DMP.

Remaining problems are many. Even limited to DMPs in 1 Peter, some questions are: do

the middle verbs ‘promartuvromai’: ‘witness beforehand’ (1:11) and ‘ajpekdevcomai’: ‘await’

(3:20) with the respective subjects of the Spirit and God (“God’s patient”) only reflect

anthromorphism; do they reflect any theology that God can be affected; or, was the verbs’

middle morphology almost losing middle semantics to be lexicalized (idiomatized) as active? I

30

am also interested in how the behaviors of the 70-plus middle/passive verbs in 1 Peter can be

placed in Kemmer’s and Bakker’s frameworks. In relation to Bakker’s study of Aktionsart, I am

also interested in how the verbal aspect theories1 will apply to these middle/passive verbs in 1

Peter and other NT writings, with implications and contributions to exegesis.2

In the limited space of this article, I could not include some other crucial linguistic

concepts. Control is important, concerning subject semantics3 such as agency and affectedness,

which were introduced in this article. Also important is the semantics of intransitive verbs,

especially unergativity and unaccusativity.4 It has been pointed out that the former is related to

intransitive verbs with more agent-hood (e.g. ‘run’, ‘study’), and the latter to those with more

patient-hood (e.g. ‘break’, ‘become’). The latter has been argued, also, in its relation to middle

semantics. Incorporating these semantic categories in middle studies is a future task, too.

Each language has its own unique properties. Here is the discussed portion of 1 Peter

2:24 from the Chinese Union Version, which I believe is one of the best translations of it: “使我

們既然在罪上死” ((Christ) made us already die concerning sin(s)).5 It does not say “killed us”

but “made us die,” which renders the original middle semantic well if my understandings are

correct and appropriate. May my exegesis be more sharpened and used for His glory!

1 Represented, for example, by Stanley Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament with

Reference to Tense and Mood (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); and Buist Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament

Greek (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).

2 Recent discourse analysis theories might also concern 1 Peter as well. More studies have been submitted

recently: Jeffrey Reed, A Discourse Analysis of Philippians (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Cynthia

Long Westfall, A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2005); Steven

Runge, Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament (Bellingham, Washington: Lexham Press, 2010), etc.

3 Klaiman, Grammatical Voice, 110-60.

4 Klaiman, Grammatical Voice, 121-4. Though not from a cognitive but generative perspective, Beth

Levin and Malka Rappaport Hovav, Unaccusativity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1995).

5 The Holy Bible: Chinese Union Version (Shen Edition) (Hong Kong: United Bible Societies, 1961), 337.

31

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Runge, Steven E. Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction

for Teaching and Exegesis. Bellingham, Washington: Lexham Press, 2010.

Saeed, John I. Semantics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1997.

Slobin, Dan. “The Origins of Grammatical Encoding of Events.” In Studies in Transitivity.

Edited by Paul J. Hopper and Sandra A. Thompson. Syntax and Semantics 15. New

York: Academic Press, 1982: 409-22.

Taylor, Bernard A. “Deponency and Greek Lexicography.” In Biblical Greek Language and

Lexicography: Essays in Honor of Frederick W. Dunker. Edited by Bernard A. Taylor,

John A. L. Lee, Peter R. Burton and Richard E. Whitaker. Grand Rapids, Michigan:

Eerdmans, 2004: 167-76.

The Committee on Bible Translation. “Preface to the New International Version.” In Zondervan

NIV Study Bible, Fully Revised. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2002: xi-xiii.

Ungerer, Friedrich, and Hans-Jörg Schmid. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. London:

Longman, 1996.

United Bible Societies, ed. The Holy Bible: Chinese Union Version. Shen Edition. Hong Kong:

United Bible Societies, 1961.

Wallace, Daniel B. Greek Grammar Beyond Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New

Testament, with Scripture, Subject, and Greek Word Indexes. Grand Rapids,

Michigan: Zondervan, 1996.

35

Webb, Robert L., and Betsy Bauman-Martin, ed. Reading First Peter with New Eyes:

Methodological Reassessments of the Letter of First Peter. London: T&T Clark, 2007;

Libronix.

Westfall, Cynthia Long. A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews: The Relationship

Between Form and Meaning. London: T&T Clark, 2005.

Westney, Paul. “Rules and Pedagogical Grammar.” In Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar.

Edited by Terence Odlin. The Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994: 72-96.

Wong, Simon S. M. A Classification of Semantic Case-Relations in the Pauline Epistles.

Studies in Biblical Greek. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Wuest, Kenneth S. Wuest’s Word Studies from the Greek New Testament: For the English

Reader. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1997; Libronix.

Young, Richard A. Intermediate New Testament Greek: A Linguistic and Exegetical Approach.

Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman and Holman, 1994.

Yule, George. The Study of Language, 3d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

36

APPENDIX

Here is a list of representative interdisciplinary works in recent biblical studies in light of modern

linguistics. In addition to these monographs and books, there are many other articles collected

mostly in books edited by Stanley Porter and leading scholars.

Burk, Denny. Articular Infinitives in the Greek of the New Testament: On the Exegetical Benefit

of Grammatical Precision. New Testament Monographs 14. Sheffield: Sheffield

Phoenix, 2006.

Danove, Paul L. Linguistics and Exegesis in the Gospel of Mark: Application of a Case Frame

Analysis and Lexicon. Studies in New Testament Greek 10. Sheffield: Sheffield

Academic, 2001.

Decker, Rodney J. Temporal Deixis of the Greek Verb in the Gospel of Mark with Reference to

Verbal Aspect. Studies in Biblical Greek 10. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

Fanning, Buist M. Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Kwong, Ivan Shing Chung. The Word Order of the Gospel of Luke: Its Foregrounded Messages.

Studies in New Testament Greek 12. London: T&T Clark, 2005.

Levinsohn, Stephen H. Discourse Features of New Testament Greek: A Coursebook on the

Information Structure of New Testament Greek, 2d. ed. Dallas: SIL International,

2000.

Martín-Asensio, Gustavo. Transitivity-Based Foregrounding in the Acts of the Apostles: A

Functional-Grammatical Approach to the Lukan Perspective. Studies in New

Testament Greek 8. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001.

McKay, K. L. A New Syntax of the Verb in New Testament Greek: An Aspectual Approach.

Studies in Biblical Greek 5. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

Mounce, William D. The Morphology of Biblical Greek: A Companion to Basics of Biblical

Greek and The Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament. Grand Rapids,

Michigan: Zondervan, 1994.

O’Donnell, Mattew Brook. Corpus Linguistics and the Greek of the New Testament. Sheffield:

Sheffield Phoenix, 2005.

37

Porter, Stanley E. Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament with Reference to Tense and

Mood. Studies in Biblical Greek 1. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

Reed, Jeffrey T. A Discourse Analysis of Philippians: Method and Rhetoric in the Debate over

Literary Integrity. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 136.

Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.

Rijksbaron, Albert. The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek: An Introduction.

3d ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Runge, Steven E. Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction

for Teaching and Exegesis. Bellingham, Washington: Lexham Press, 2010.

Wallace, Daniel B. Greek Grammar Beyond Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New

Testament, with Scripture, Subject, and Greek Word Indexes. Grand Rapids,

Michigan: Zondervan, 1996.

Westfall, Cynthia Long. A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews: The Relationship

Between Form and Meaning. Library of New Testament Studies 297. London: T&T

Clark, 2005.

Wong, Simon S. M. A Classification of Semantic Case-Relations in the Pauline Epistles.

Studies in Biblical Greek 9. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.