Tyndale House Workshop in Greek Prepositions

From Will Ross and Steve Runge, a conference modeled after the well-done Greek verb conference from a few years back:

Students and scholars of Greek have long wrestled with understanding the meaning of prepositions. This challenge is partly the result of the centuries-old tradition in Greek lexicography of providing glosses (or translation equivalents) in the target language that fail to capture the meaning of a lexical item. 

Moreover, the semantics of Greek and English prepositions do not isometrically overlap, giving the misleading appearance of polysemy. In an effort to address these challenges, this Workshop aims to approach semantic description of Koine prepositions from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and prototype theory.  

Following the work of Silvia Luraghi (2003) and Pietro Bortone (2010) on Greek prepositions, there is growing consensus among scholars of Greek that the cognitive linguistic approach to meaning is the most promising way forward.  

Yet to date no concerted effort has been made towards applying this cognitive approach in a form that is accessible to non-specialists, which provides the occasion and motivation for our Workshop.  

This Workshop will be cross-disciplinary, bringing together classicists, biblical scholars, linguists, and theologians.

Speakers include

• Dirk Geeraerts, University of Leuven
• Richard A. Rhodes, U.C. Berkeley
• Jonathan A. Pennington, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Patrick James, University of Cambridge
• Steven Runge, Logos Bible Software
• Randall Buth, Biblical Language Center

June 30-July 1, 2017. Registration opens March 1. No call for papers is forthcoming. More info at greekprepositionworkshop.org. Background on the conference at Will’s blog. It sounds fun. I wish I could be there for it.