Fred Long and Emily Reina Kerkhof 2024 SBL Partyciple Presentation

This video is edited from our paper "Having More Fun with Partyciples: Navigating the Discourse Pragmatics of Circumstantial Participles in Matthew's Gospel" presented in 2024 at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics.

ABSTRACT: A cursory overview of Greek grammars reveals that participles are fraught with confusion. Although consensus exists that participles are verbal adjectives mixing verbal and adjectival morphology, the semantic and pragmatic function of circumstantial participles, and resulting translation strategies enjoy much less consensus. In this paper, first, in order to evaluate the range of discord in the description of participles, we briefly summarize the standard grammatical treatments of so-called “adverbial” participles (A. T. Robertson, BDF, Daniel B. Wallace, etc.) before engaging modern linguistic treatments of “circumstantial” participles in Stephen H. Levinsohn, Martin M. Culy, Steven E. Runge, Fredrick J. Long, etc. Second, we will describe Long's discourse pragmatic model of circumstantial participles primarily understood as efficiently conveying actions or states in relation to the main verb according to whether the participle occurs before in a pre-nuclear position or after in a post-nuclear position. The three pre-nuclear functions include segue, framework, and/or procedure; the three post-nuclear functions include redundant, explanatory, and/or transitional. Third, we will apply new developments in the discourse pragmatic model to circumstantial participles in Matthew’s Gospel to demonstrate how this model can bring necessary order to unruly “partyciples.”