style and pseudonymity in pauline scholarship 127
many of his letters at least had the feature +published (locally)—others
may have been published later apart from his original intention, either
by himself or his followers more globally. ±Private can be established on
the basis of addressee relations in order to determine setting. that cov-
ers features within the mode of the discourse. as for tenor, Paul encodes
plurality in his epistolary openings, indicating when he writes to a group
(e.g., romans) or individuals (e.g., Philemon). addressees of Pauline let-
ters will share in common +absent.48 Participant reference and semantic
domain analysis help us understand levels of interactiveness, another of
Biber’s subcomponents in addressor-addressee relations.49 the shared
knowledge between addressor and addressee(s) in the Pauline corpus will
also vary. the romans will have less shared knowledge with Paul than,
say, timothy would have. fortunately, we know a good bit about Paul (the
addressor) and can assess very clearly issues such as ethnicity, gender,
occupation, and so on (context of culture). With the exception of per-
haps a radical few, most grant that Paul’s letters—even if pseudonymity
is involved—were intended to project factual information within the field
of their discourses. Purpose and topics are more difficult to pin down, but
i think we can come to some general agreement concerning the issues
that Paul’s letters address.
Combining Bell, Halliday, and Biber: A Register Design Model for Single
Author Style-Shifting
combining Biber’s and halliday’s register analysis allows us the ability to
analyze both dimensions of Bell’s audience design model for style-shift:
the social dimension and the style dimension. With Biber’s formalization
of the situational components of register, we can assess social variation.
Bell allows us to track this change at the synchronic and diachronic levels.
48 Presence is a subcomponent of Biber’s addressor-addressee relations not listed in
fig. 2 below, for this reason.
49 Porter, “functional distribution,” 67–68, summarizes the conversion of Biber’s eng-
lish forms for encoding interactiveness to a set of greek features, including “private verbs
(e.g., thinking, feeling), use of first and second person pronouns and verb endings (imply-
ing involvement by speaker or hearer in interactive discourse), and a number of individual
features, such as imperfective aspect (with more of a heightened sense of immediacy than
perfective aspect), analytic negation (a negating word, such as ou or mē), demonstrative
pronouns/adjectives, the use of eimi (‘be’) as a main verb, the use of verbs (as conveyors
of processes), and several other features.” Porter applies these features to the Pastorals,
romans, Philippians, and 1 corinthians. o’donnell, Corpus Linguistics, 167, applies them
to the entire new testament. i use o’donnell’s analysis as the basis of my interactive/
informative scores.