Status Updates From Linguistics and New Testame...

There's an Italian proverb, "Traduttore traditore" which we translate into English (somewhat ironically and treasonously) as "Translator, traitor." In either language this proverb can be read and applied in sundry ways, one of which is to highlight something that all bilingual people know: different languages map reality in different ways.

(Pennington, 83)

An awareness of contextualized meaning then naturally leads to the study of larger chunks of texts (namely, discourse), which have improved our understanding of the nature of grammar and language above the sentence level.

In contrast, a discourse grammar approach focuses on the clause as a whole, recognizing that the manner in which verbs engage with noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses will constrain the interpretation from the start.

What Wallace calls an “exegetical syntax” is really a dive into semantic, exegetically derived usage. I am increasingly convinced that trying to attach (what appear to students as) ontological categories to describe polysemous, contextually derived meaning is not a helpful way forward.