style and pseudonymity in pauline scholarship 143
A Register Design Interpretation of Co-Textual Variation (Style-Shift)
the final application of our study on the register, genre, and style of the
Pauline corpus as it relates to the issue of pseudonymity involves the eval-
uation of style-shift. in many ways, the entire debate leans on a specific
interpretation of style-shifting within the corpus. Pseudonymity interpre-
tations insist that shift in style indicates shift in author. others disagree,
but usually without a formally quantifiable body of comparative data to
which they can appeal. i will focus on the potential linguistic impact of
shifts in interpersonal meaning, since these have been shown to have the
greatest co-textual influence and will calibrate the co-textual features
typically used to gauge style.
the Pastoral letters not only group the most closely to one another,
but also vary the most substantially from the other ten letters in Paul’s
name. yet this is what we would expect, given the drastic register varia-
tion, especially within interpersonal meaning, between the Pastorals and
the other ten. Perhaps most significantly, we have a shift in plurality, from
+group to +individual.79 We also have a shift in shared knowledge, from
personal-public to personal-private at the level of intimacy and probably
also at the level of specialization (shared teacher-pupil/discipleship or
leadership vocabulary).80 this may account for much of the shared tech-
nical vocabulary that emerges together within the Pastorals, but not found
within the other ten letters. the liturgical language, for example, may be
technical theological vocabulary Paul uses for leaders and, while the same
structures are potentially emerging in the church communities he writes
to in his earlier letters (cf. Phil 1:1; acts 14:23), he intentionally down-
grades this language for his public “lay” audience. another factor involves
the diachronic location of register profile 5. it comes at the end of the
apostle’s church planting career, the goal of which was to plant churches
79 rickford and mcnair-Knox’s study in audience designed style-shift indicates the shift
from +group to +individual in the plurality parameter of the addressee component in a
register profile is one of the most significant for impacting substantial style-shift. across
their four test groups, they observe a minimum of 50% and as much as 96% style-shift,
with an average of around 75%, in invariant be usage with the shift in this component
alone ( John r. rickford and faye mcnair-Knox, “addressee- and topic-influenced Style-
shift: a Quantitative Sociolinguistic Study,” in Biber and finegan [eds.], Sociolinguistic
Perspectives on Register, 235–76).
80 edward finegan and douglas Biber, “register Variation and Social dialect Variation:
the register axiom,” in eckert and rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation,
249–50, have shown the substantial impact that this change can have upon vocabulary,
specifically in semantic domain density (economy words) between interviews (private)
and public speeches (public).