PREPOSITIONS IN BIBLICAL GREEK: Postclassical Greek Prepositions and Conceptual Metaphor. Cognitive Semantic Analysis and Biblical Interpretation. (Fontes et Subsidia ad Bibliam pertinentes 12.) Pp. xii + 307, figs, ills. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. Cased, £94, €102.95, US$118.99. ISBN: 978-3-11-077404-7

• Published in: The Classical review 2024, Vol.74 (1), p.250-252
• Main Author: George, Coulter H
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bible; Cognitive linguistics; Cognitive semantics; Conceptual metaphor; Construal; Dictionaries; Grammatical relations; Greek language; Linguistics; Meaning; Metaphor; Prepositions; Semantic analysis; Semantics; Theoretical linguistics; Topics
• ISSN: 0009-840X; 1464-3561
• DOI: 10.1017/S0009840X23001221

Sometimes they have clear semantic value, often spatial in nature (above the sofa vs below the table); sometimes they are reduced to signifying grammatical relations (we gave the book to the student, they were hit by a car). [...]it is hardly a surprise that dictionaries find them challenging to handle, and, at some level, all the studies in this volume (the product of a workshop held in Cambridge, UK, in 2017) grapple with the problem of how to categorise their usage in biblical Greek as clearly as possible. By prioritising such networks in the description of a preposition, one can avoid the trap (into which many dictionaries fall) of merely listing one gloss after another, suggesting a far more unstructured semantic chaos than is actually the case. [...]to take one of the clearer results of the volume, co-editor Runge's chapter, ‘Land Forms, Weapons, and Body Parts: How Mismatches in Preferred Construals Have Shaped Our Understanding of Greek Prepositions’, considers inter alia how biblical Greek describes events that take place on a mountain. Perhaps it will make a contribution to cognitive linguistic theory, but it is unlikely that many whose chief interest is the Greek of the New Testament will learn much from such sentences as ‘Location belongs to the around-region and can code path or endpoint focus in three-dimensional space’ (p. 88), especially when the final conclusion, that περί had three distinct senses at this time – location (i.e. around a place), area (i.e. near a place) and topic (i.e. about a subject) – will not greatly change many readers’ understanding of the preposition. [...]while the bibliography is indeed rich in general linguistic scholarship, it is strange that, in a chapter that devotes so much discussion to topics, important Greek-specific literature goes unmentioned: he does not engage with the relevant work of either D. Matić (Studies in Language 27 [2003]) or R. Allan (Mnemosyne 67 [2014]).