Jeff Chavez’s Reviews > Linguistics and New Testament Greek: Key Issues in the Current Debate > Status Update

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.

unless we understand language typology and crosslinguistic frameworks, we are making our work unusable for an increasingly global church, whose members are maturing and which is developing into serious centers of study. From my perspective, there may be no more urgent area for linguistic analysis and integration than within the biblical studies guild. 243

In fact, the drifting of the biblical studies and Bible translation cousins is close to resulting in mutually unintelligible dialects. In this matter, we stand as children of a divorce, watching our parents live separate lives, and this is to be mourned as one of the most tragic results of this linguistic history.
—Linguistics and New Testament Greek. 239-40

Reading comprehension directly relates to what is termed “exegesis” in biblical studies. If we want to increase exegetical comprehension skills in Greek, we need to provide extensive oral Greek development.

We must not abolish the teaching of grammar. We must reform it. Language teaching must start afresh.