Marta Merino Hernández

The objective of this thesis is to provide a semantical analysis of the Greek prepositions of movement ἀπό, διά, εἰς, ἐκ and πρός in the New Testament. Based on the methodology applied by the Greek-Spanish Dictionary of the New Testament (DGENT) we also attemptto illuminate some NT passages in which the meaning of these prepositions has provoked disagreement among translators and exegetes . On the basis of this study we intend to show thatsemantics is the basis on which exegetical analysis must be based, in order to provide a rigorous interpretation of the texts.

·         Chapter I, "State of the issue," offers a critical analysis of the most outstanding contributions in relation to the study of the Greek preposition.

·         Chapter II, " Prepositions in Hellenistic Greek, " describes some of the major changes in the Greek prepositional system that took place in Hellenistic times. The Greek of the NT broadly reflects the transformations of the prepositional system in Hellenistic Greek. From this, we extract that, during this period of the Greek language, the notion indicated by the preposition is specified more by the context than by the case.

·         Chapter III, "Methodological issues," presents the methodology of semantic analysis followed for the study of ἀπό, διά, εἰς, ἐκ and πρός and compares it with contemporary lexicography. For the elaboration of its lemmas the DGENT applies a method of semantic analysis based on the following principles:

a)     systematic distinction between meaning and translation in the drafting of entries;

b)     creation of the definition of the lexical meaning of lexemes accompanied by the corresponding translation. Moreover, definitions and translations are also elaborated for different sememes or meanings of the lexeme in question;

c)     elaboration of the semantic formula of the lexemes to identify which semantic species, both denoted and connoted, compose the morpholexeme (semic development);

d)     explanation of the contextual factor(s) that provoke(s) the semantic change of the individual lexemes;

e)     verification of all the contexts in which a lexeme appears within the NT's corpus.

·         Chapters IV - VII are devoted to the semantic analysis of ἀπό, διά, εἰς, ἐκ and πρός. They show that the DGENT method allows us to specify and structure the different meanings of each preposition, discovering a nexus between its different meanings by means of analyzing their contextual factors.

It also helps us determine the notional scope of each morpholexeme in the selected NT passages, resolving interpretative disagreements about the meaning of the prepositions analyzed, shedding light on its interpretation, and highlighting that an adequate understanding of the meaning of prepositions in context is essential for exegesis.

Supervisor: Prof. dr. Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta