The Ancient Greek Nominal Group, with Attention to the Greek New Testament

Abstract

Together with Latin, Ancient Greek has had a strong influence on grammatical theories and descriptions. This is reflected in traditional descriptions of the Ancient Greek nominal group (i.e., noun phrase), which are heavily syntagmatic and dependent on conventional parts-of-speech. In this paper, we explore the nominal group from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This allows for a more overtly paradigmatic description, yet one that is nevertheless still grounded in the syntagmatic patterns observed by traditional Greek grammar. We begin by discussing some systems expressed by inflectional morphology, namely gender and number. We then present systems realized through the insertion of what we call “substantive” nominal group functions, namely speech role, naming, description, differentiation, distribution, association, and reiteration. The functions that realize these systems can each serve as the syntagmatic head of an Ancient Greek nominal group, but where more than one of them is realized, the most substantive one will serve as head. By contrast, the specification system is realized by a grammatical marker with left-to-right scope. To conclude the paper, we briefly discuss linear ordering in Ancient Greek nominal groups and some functional explanations of their many possible orderings.