Paul and Pseudepigraphy (Pauline Studies, Book 8)

style and pseudonymity in pauline scholarship 129

environments, and (2) a parallel social dimension for linguistic change

along this horizontal axis to account for changes in the diachronic social

lexicon. We locate individual “time Slices” (characterized by significant

social activities, e.g., imprisonments, missionary journeys) in the author’s

life that provide the social context for the production of a writing or group

of writings on the relevant location within the timeline. We also locate

the addressees and their situational features here. inscribed addressees

are convenient markers for performing addressee interpersonal analy-

sis for a particular letter. this accounts for Bell’s contextual axis, along

which we group several “register profiles,” according to diachronic loca-

tion on the landscape (e.g., the thessalonian letters were written around

the same time from the same place, so they would form a register profile),

but which also tend to yield a parallel social profile. thus, any number

of writings created in a single time slice may populate a register profile

vertically (although, for simplicity, the above register profiles only repre-

sent one writing each). Biber’s situational components formalize points

of social variation within each register profile in order to facilitate assess-

ment of individual writings. register profiles or socially related groups of

writings may be contrasted with one another for the purposes of analysis.

this enables the comparison of register variation within a single author

over an extended period of time within a variety of social contexts, allow-

ing us to study the correlation—if any—between Bell’s two dimensions

of style-shift, the contextual (social) and the co-textual (stylistic). once

we have located levels of register variation (temporal and contextual), we

can then look at the co-textual differences between register profiles to see

whether language variation tracks with social variations, as sociolinguistic

studies in style-shift predict.

this comparative register profile landscape features the tenor of dis-

course, along with its interpersonal realizations, as the most developed

metafunction due to Bell’s insight that this remains the most significant

component of register for assessing style-shift. conveniently, Biber’s regis-

ter model develops the situational components for tenor most thoroughly.

in addition to an addressor’s location on the timeline (Biber’s chronology

feature) and social setting within the time slice, issues of geography may

also be relevant due to linguistic influences upon the addressor’s language

due to living and working in a specific region, among a specific people,

with distinct linguistic tendencies. Paul’s tendency to sometimes occupy

several geographical locations within a single time slice calls for further

precision here. i have divided Biber’s geography, as it relates to the addres-

sor, into go, where we will want to consider the various regions in which