The αἰτέω / αἰτέομαι Distinction in the New Testament: A proposal 103 causes the message to go to the Experiencer), whereas emphasis on the Experiencer highlights the reception and interpretation of the Content (the Agent causes the Experiencer to receive the message).4 Emphasis on the Experiencer has the implication that the Content is interpreted successfully.5 Since the English “ask” also licenses both emphases (ask Content of/from an Experiencer and ask an Experiencer for Content), the English translations automatically signal this distinction in emphasis. The distinctions in affectedness and emphasis accommodate four pos- sible usages for αἰτέω, which are labeled according to the first letters of their arguments, A (Agent), C (Content), and E (Experiencer), arranged with the emphasized argument in second position, ACE or AEC, and followed after a hyphen (-) by the notation on subject affectedness, Act (active) and Mid (middle): ACE-Act/ACE-Mid/AEC-Act/AEC-Mid. 2. Statement of the Active/Middle Distinction This discussion proposes the statement of the active/middle distinc- tion that receives illustration and further explication in the remainder of this article. The statement requires the introduction of one presupposi- tion and four characteristics observed for the NT occurrences of αἰτέω. The statement assumes that αἰτέω grammaticalizes a particular con- ceptualization of the action of asking that distinguishes this verb from all other Greek verbs of asking. According to this particular conceptu- alization, an Agent that is unable to achieve something asks it of an Experiencer that is able to achieve it. The Agent’s inability reflects a lack of social standing, religious or political authority, or physical capac- 4 Most frequently, discussions of the Content/Experiencer emphasis employ a movement (cause to go)/possession (cause to have) distinction: cf. S. Pinker, Learnability and Cogni- tion: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (Cambridge, MA 1987) 48, 63; M. Speas, Phrase Structure in Natural Language (Nordrecht 1990) 87-89; D. Pesetsky, Zero Syntax: Experiencers and Cascades (Cambridge, MA 1995) 135-38; and M.R. Hovav and B. Levin, “The English Dative Alternation: the Case for Verb Sensitivity”, Journal of Linguistics 44 (2008) 134. However, the movement (cause to go)/reception (cause to receive) distinction better explains the implication that the emphasized Experiencer successfully interprets the Content/message: cf. A. Goldberg, “The Inherent Semantics of Argument Structure: The Case of the English Ditransitive Construction”, Cognitive Linguistics 3-1 (1992) 46, 49-52. Although these authors are concerned with “dative alternation” among various classes of English verbs (X tells Y Z / X tells Z to Y), the movement/reception constraints on the English verbs appear to parallel exactly those of Greek verbs of communication. 5 A. Lehrer, “Checklist for Verbs of Speaking”, Acta Linguistica Hungarica 38:1-4 (1988) 155.