style and pseudonymity in pauline scholarship 119
confirm these findings.20 Still other modern linguists—while acknowledg-
ing that some criteria may be valid—due to these numerous complexities,
remain skeptical of determinations of authorship based on semantic rich-
ness, no matter how large the corpus size or similar the register; according
to some, it simply does not constitute a sound criterion for authorship
discrimination—in any situation.21 Such theoretical, methodological, and
critical awareness makes many statistical studies of authorship in the Pau-
line corpus look naïve by comparison.
these studies show that authorship attribution on the basis of statisti-
cal linguistic study exceeds the complexity often assumed by statistical
studies of Pauline style in investigations of pseudonymity. contemporary
corpus, computational, and statistical linguistic theory seems to suggest
that the Pauline corpus is not only too small for linguistic based style
analysis of authorship attribution, but too varied in register (most letters
claim to have been written to different people in different places at differ-
ent times in Paul’s life) to provide an adequate representative sample of
Paul’s writings. there is simply no way to know, based on linguistic con-
siderations alone, if the variation we find results from change of author
since these can easily be due to change in register.
Sociolinguistic Analysis of Style: Interpretive Tools and Definitions
Sociolinguistics provides us with the viable set of interpretive tools neces-
sary to assess these findings so common in Pauline scholarship regarding
authorship, which most studies along these lines lack, since it effectively
explores not only the distinction but also the interaction between social
and textual dimensions of linguistic variation. the vast majority of dis-
cussion on Pauline authorship only attends to the latter. contemporary
sociolinguistic theory focuses on the interplay between the two. françoise
gadet summarizes the consensus understanding when he says that style
“is a pragmatic phenomenon, which brings into play different aspects of
identity and belonging and can only be interpreted within interaction.”22
But the impact of social structures has rarely been seriously considered in
style that can be applied univocally across all time periods, registers, and genres in which
the author composes discourse.
20 See Stamou, “Stylochronometry,” 182–84.
21 e.g., d. l. hoover, “another Perspective on Vocabulary richness,” Computers and the
Humanities 37 (2003): 151–78.
22 françoise gadet, “research on Sociolinguistic Style / Soziolinguistische Stilfor-
schung,” in ulrich ammon (ed.), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science
of Language and Society 3: Soziolinguistik: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Wissenschaft