Last May I began revising and revamping a preexisting work used by one of my professors at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. The Lexicon is in essence a summary (even an interpretation) of BDAG, covering a large swath of important exegetical and interpretive Greek words, namely conjunctions, adverbs, particles, prepositions, etc. The idea is that the Lexicon gives a brief summary of the primary logical functions of ‘x’ word, so that when one is attempting to find the argumentative flow of thought in a chunk of text the Lexicon can help identify important words as signposts in that pursuit.

It is a work in progress. The project I embarked upon was significantly different than what I am now doing. At first it was merely retyping the document and updating page references to the new edition (’00) of Bauer, as well as adding pertinent page references in Wallace’s Greek Grammar: Beyond the Basics. After using the Lexicon for one academic year, however, it became evident that there were both missing words, as well as errors in specific entries, either mis-labeling logical functions or leaving too much unsaid about a particular word. As a result, I am now going back through the whole thing, alongside Bauer, and reevaluating the accuracy of the logical designations of each word’s entry according to the first ‘authors’ of the work, making changes as needed. To assist that process, I am reading a variety of books and articles on linguistics and discourse analysis theory.

This is a sample page of the Lexicon. Of course, please do not reproduce or distribute, as it is under copyright at present (not to mention, again, that there may be errors still).

Here is a bibliography of some of my summer reading towards this project’s completion:

• The Semantic Structure of Written Communication – Beekman, Callow, and Kopesec (Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1981).
• The Thread of Discourse – Joseph E. Grimes (The Hague & Paris: Mouton 1975).
• The Semantics of Biblical Language – James Barr (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004).
• Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior – Kenneth L. Pike (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).
• Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics – John Lyons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

WAR