Literary function of alla in counter-propositional constructions in comparison to de, kai, and asyndeton in John's gospel

Abstract

Connectives, as insignificant as they may seem, are essential elements of a language to facilitate effective communication. The Greek New Testament is particularly replete in inter-sentential conjunctions. However, little attention has been devoted to the sentence-level contrasts and the connectives used in such contexts in John’s Gospel. Conventional reference grammars and lexica focus primarily on semantics and assign a range of English glosses to account for Greek connectives. Moreover, most grammarians ascribe multiple, unrelated functions to connectives. These approaches resulted in the conflation of different connectives, limiting their use to mere stylistic variation and blurring each connective’s unique contribution to understanding the text. This, in turn, overlooks the authorial choices of connectives and ultimately undermines the necessity of their use altogether. In light of recent linguistic studies, connectives are understood as pragmatic devices that guide readers’ processing of texts within their contexts. Hence, they were not used arbitrarily. If the author had options among the available connectives, the choice of one over another had pragmatic reasons. This study aims to investigate the unique constraint imposed by the Greek sentence-linking particle ἀλλά, which is not shared by other conjunctions following a negative proposition. This selection was driven not only by its high frequency in John’s Gospel but also by the interchange between various connectives (ἀλλά, δέ, καί, and asyndeton) in countering propositions. Moreover, there remains a lack of a procedural account of ἀλλά in John’s Gospel. This study then (1) analyzes the function of ἀλλά in negative-positive constructions; (2) examines unique functions of ἀλλά compared to other connectives occurring in the same context, such as δέ, καί, and asyndeton; (3) explores the function of propositional orders of negative-positive and vice-versa; and (4) discerns the relevance of the study of these connectives for exegesis of John’s Gospel. I adopt an eclectic approach that integrates text-linguistic analysis with relevance theory as the theoretical basis for my examination. This study concludes that the connective ἀλλά has a unique procedural function that distinguishes it from δέ, καί, and asyndeton in counterproposition constructions. The relevance of the distinction between the connectives is best appreciated when reading biblical texts with the awareness that connectives have a procedural function, signaling certain types of relationship between propositions. Understanding the author’s choice of linguistic features, including his usage of inter-sentence connectives, is a significant step toward uncovering the meaning he intends to convey, thus informing the exegesis.