The Greek Article: A Functional Grammar of Ho-items in the Greek New Testament with special emphasis on the Greek Article

Abstract

Grammatical treatments of the Greek article have historically operated from an orientation that views the article as, essentially, a demonstrative pronoun and more or less analogous to the English definite article. In certain circumstances, an association between the Greek article and the relative pronoun has been acknowledged. However, this association does not generally inform the grammatical description of the article's function. It is the conviction of the following thesis that this orientation is in error and has resulted in an inaccurate understanding of the function of the Greek article. The grammatical descriptions that are the result of this perspective are often internally inconsistent and, in some instances, contradictory. When the aforementioned assumptions are discarded and the article and relative pronoun are examined in terms of morphology and function, the results reveal a considerable degree of functional overlap between the two parts of speech. Both parts of speech are often employed to produce structures that may fill the same syntactical slot. Both parts of speech are used by the speaker to indicate that he or she is providing information that the recipient is to use for the purpose of identification. Both orient the identification ofthe referent to the speaker. Categorically, the two may be identified by a designation based on their common morphological features: Ho-items.