ON THE IDIOMATIC NATURE OF THE GOTHIC NEW-TESTAMENT, A COMPARATIVE-STUDY OF PREPOSITIONAL USAGE IN GOTHIC AND NEW-TESTAMENT GREEK

In syntagms involving preposition + object the match‐up between Gothic and Greek seems at first sight highly capricious both lexically and with regard to case government. This paper presents the results of an exhaustive analysis of every prepositional phrase of both Greek and Gothic within a delimited but significant subcorpus of the Gothic Bible. Once one has made allowance for diachronic developments affecting the case systems of Greek and Gothic, the resulting structure represents an idiomatic and cohesive syntactic, semantic, and lexical system within Gothic. These findings support Curme's contention that our extant Gothic corpus is idiomatic and not a slavish and forced Gothicized version of Greek. Copyright © 1992, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved