Book Announcement: Postclassical Greek Prepositions and Conceptual Metaphor

I’m very pleased to make a formal announcement today of a new book that I have co-edited with Steve Runge. This volume is to be published with De Gruyter in their FoSub series and is currently scheduled for release in November. 

Some of my regular readers may recognize the fact that this book is the long-awaited results of the Tyndale House Workshop in Greek Prepositions. Steve and I organized and hosted that event in Cambridge back in 2017 and had both a great turnout and excellent discussion. 

Yes, there were significant delays in the process of turning a bunch of presentations into a published volume. It’s quite a lot of work, if you’re wondering. And it hasn’t exactly been an uneventful five years for either me or Steve … or for the rest of the world. Even so, it’s finished now and we are very pleased with the results, which we’re sure will be just as relevant as ever.

Here’s the description:

Traditional semantic description of Ancient Greek prepositions has struggled to synthesize the varied and seemingly arbitrary uses into something other than a disparate, sometimes overlapping list of senses. The Cognitive Linguistic approach of prototype theory holds that the meanings of a preposition are better explained as a semantic network of related senses that radially extend from a primary, spatial sense. These radial extensions arise from contextual factors that affect the metaphorical representation of the spatial scene that is profiled. Building upon the Cognitive Linguistic descriptions of Bortone (2009) and Luraghi (2009), linguists, biblical scholars, and Greek lexicographers apply these developments to offer more in-depth descriptions of select postclassical Greek prepositions and consider the exegetical and lexicographical implications of these findings. This volume will be of interest to those studying or researching the Greek of the New Testament seeking more linguistically-informed description of prepositional semantics, particularly with a focus on the exegetical implications of choice among seemingly similar prepositions in Greek and the challenges of potentially mismatched translation into English.

There are informal plans afoot to continue working in similar veins as this event on prepositions and the earlier Greek verb event at Tyndale House that was coordinated by Chris Fresch. Here’s to hoping that work in these areas will continue to be possible!