The challenge of reconciling a verbal form’s variety of senses on the one hand and its conceptual coherence on the other is solved, not by positing a highly abstract, semantically invariant core from which each use is derived, nor by simply constructing taxonomies of contextually conditioned senses with “exceptions.” Rather a form’s senses can be arranged diachronically along cross- linguistically consistent and cognitively motivated paths of change from which it becomes apparent that each sense has a direct conceptual relation only to adjacent senses on the path of change. These senses are synchronically organized in terms of prototypicality and fall along a semantic-pragmatic continuum according to conventionalization. Furthermore, senses previously thought of as “exceptional” are also conceptually related, but only indirectly via their common relationship to the overarching path of change.

The pruning of the Pauline Canon is considered one of the signal achievements of contemporary New Testament studies. Quite intriguingly, however, no consensus on the Pauline Canon exists among researchers who have actually executed quantitative studies of style in the Greek New Testament (GNT). From the perspective of functional linguistics, no study in the GNT has been executed that uses a linguistically comprehensive set of measures for either the syntagmatic structures, paradigmatic systems, multiple strata or multiple metafunctions of the GNT. In this study we will pursue an approach that, for the first time, visually compares and contrasts these three dimensions in some depth. The advantages of such an approach are its (1) comprehensive selection of linguistic measures across six representative syntagmatic ranks in the GNT, (2) use of two data- driven (rather than ad hoc) feature-selection methods, (3) use of multiple extractive multivariate techniques (correspondence analysis and multiple correspondence analysis) which provide highly interpretable visualizations of the data, and (4) use of a formal experimental design methodology that explores each level of linguistic rank. This study proposes that such an approach provides a meaningful next step to the work of Neumann and Mealand in particular, and that the tighter integration of linguistics and multivariate visualization combines to provide new insights into the textual boundaries of the Pauline Canon.

Daniel Wallace, in a review of Ronald D. Peters’ The Greek Article: A Functional Grammar of ὁ -items in the Greek New Testament with Special Emphasis on the Greek Article, published in the Review of Biblical Literature, not only challenges Peters’ proposed grammar of the Greek article, but also the scholarship behind the theoretical model. The following is a response to Wallace’s review in which the debate between Peters and Wallace is located in the context of the general characteristics of paradigm shifts in science and scholarship. The presentation relies primarily on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The thesis of the following response is that, using Kuhn’s framework and terminology, the debate between Peters and Wallace is characteristic of the conflict that inevitably arises between the novel theory and normal science, respectively.