Modeling Biblical Language presents articles with some of the latest scholarship applying linguistic theory to the study of the Christian Bible. The contributors are all associated with the McMaster Divinity College Linguistic Circle, a collegial forum for presenting working papers in modern linguistics (especially Systemic Functional Linguistics) and biblical studies. The papers address a range of topics in linguistic theory and the Hebrew and Greek languages. Topics include linguistic model building, temporality and verbal aspect, Greek lexical semantics and Hebrew-Greek translation, appraisal and evaluation theory, metaphor theory, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and Greek clausal structure. These various areas of linguistic exploration contribute generally to the interpretation and analysis of the Old and New Testaments, as well as to linguistic theory proper.

Structural linguists have focused on the morphological patternings of the Romance verb system, both from the point of view of systematizing variation and of mapping meaning on the form. Transformationalists, however, have tended to focus on the English auxiliaries. This book fills a gap in previous accounts by investigating the syntax of Romance verb-form usage, concerning both the verb itself and a simple sentence and such phenomena as sequence of tense in complex sentences. Adopting both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, and combining the approaches of structuralists and transformationalists, the author argues that there are still valid ideas to be drawn from the pre-Chomskyan concern with paradigmatic structure.

What is time? How does our sense of time lead us to approach the world? How did the peoples of the past view time? This book answers these questions through an investigation of the cultures of time in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and the Australian Dreamtime. It argues that our contemporary world is blind as to the significance and complexity of time, preferring to believe that time is natural and unchanging. This is of critical importance to historians since the base matter of their study is time, yet there is almost no theoretical literature on time in history. This book offers the first detailed historiographical study of the centrality of time to human cultures. It sets out the complex ways in which ideas of time developed in the major world religions, and the manner in which such conceptions led people both to live in ways very different to our contemporary world and to make very different kinds of histories. It goes on to argue that modern scientific descriptions of time, such as Einsteins Theory of Relativity, lie much closer to the complex understandings of time in religions such as Christianity than they do to our common-sense notions of time which are centred on progress through a past, present and future.