Biblical scholars dispute the meaning and function of ἐγώ εἰμι uttered by Jesus in John 8:24 and 8:28. This paper proposes a linguistic method that provides a framework to assess the linguistic features of the New Testament text and that may offer new insights into the Johannine ἐγώ εἰμι clauses. By adopting the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this paper conducts a register analysis of ἐγώ εἰμι in John 8:24 and 8:28, with reference to Isa 43:10 and 43:25. Based on this analysis, the paper argues that ἐγώ εἰμι uttered by Jesus in John 8:24 and 8:28 is used intentionally as an allusion to the divine name in the Old Testament, which specifically and powerfully invokes the image of God, and that this wording therefore functions to portray Jesus’ divinity.

Vilém Mathesius’s most important contribution to the field of linguistics is the theory of the Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP). According to this theory, the message of an utterance is construed by two content elements designated as “theme” and “rheme.” Mathesius’s analysis was constrained to the clause; however, he indicated that theme and rheme are present at various strata of discourse. By presenting and applying an optimized version of FSP for Koine Greek, this article strives to determine the discourse structure of Paul’s epistle to Titus and hence the central message of its content.

In this article, I explore the descriptive challenges posed by a richly morphological language like Greek by considering a possible alignment between Gregory Stump’s paradigm-linkage hypothesis and the Cardiff Grammar’s model of syntax and its relationship with semantics and form. I give several minor examples that apply the aligned model to Greek, making the case that Stump’s hypothesis clarifies the Cardiff Grammar’s notion of realization statements—why there are apparently inconsistent patterns in realization—where functional grammars tend to rely on probabilities. This clarity is instrumental for syntactic theorizing for synthetic languages like Greek. Finally, I suggest some of the implications of this argument for the specification of syntactic categories in Greek, whose semantic and syntactic paradigms are, like its inflectional paradigms, shaped in critical ways by morphosyntactic property sets.

This paper explores linguistic structures beyond the paragraph level, an area often overlooked in modern linguistics despite its importance for interpretation. While discourse analysis is growing, paragraph-level studies remain underdeveloped. I employ Stanley E. Porter’s criteria for paragraphing and apply Ruqaiya Hasan’s cohesive harmony analysis to group paragraphs. Through an analysis of James 1, I argue that verse 13, rather than verses 12 or 16, marks the beginning of the latter half. Two key pieces of evidence support this conclusion. First, verse 13 introduces new similarity chains, establishing a dominant topical thread for the remainder of the text. Second, according to the analysis of chain interaction, the chain of trial, which had been interacting with endurance, begins to interact with lexical items related to truth/falsehood/evil. While preliminary, this paper demonstrates the potential for extending linguistic analysis beyond the paragraph level, offering a promising avenue for further research in discourse and textual interpretation.