External possession in New Testament Greek

The Greek of the New Testament displays an almost exclusively postnominal positioning of genitives within the noun/determiner phrase (henceforth, DP). The few prenominal instances are usually considered to be residues of the Classical Greek grammatical system, which allowed both pre- and postnominal genitives. In this work I focus on a subset of such instances, extraposed genitives, which are syntactically characterized by the fact that the genitive not only is prenominal, but also precedes the determiner heading the DP to which the genitive is semantically linked. The first goal of this work is to further substantiate Havers’ (1911) claim that extraposed genitives in New Testament Greek take the place of the receding dativus sympatheticus of Indo-European ancestry and, therefore, come close to the functional domain of external possessors. The second goal is to connect this development to a more general revolutionary process in the history of Greek, by arguing that the specialization of the extraposed genitive construction with pronominal forms is an important step towards the syncretism of genitive and dative case.