Introduction to Biblical Language Linguistics

Linguistics is the systematic study of how language works: how its smallest meaningful pieces are formed, how they are put together, and how people use them to communicate. The linguistics literature is very complex, but it has a great deal to offer in how we understand language in general, and that understanding can help us better understand a particular language like Greek or Hebrew, and a particular text like the Bible.

This course introduces the core terms linguists use and some of the issues they are currently working on, grouped into four areas: semantics, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics.

Why Linguistics Matters for Biblical Greek and Hebrew

Readers of the biblical languages constantly make claims about what a form means: what a tense contributes, what the article is doing, why a verb comes first. Linguistics gives those claims precision. Ho Iēsous is perfectly normal Greek, yet no one would say the Jesus in English. So either the definite article or proper nouns must behave differently in Greek, and working out which sheds light on what the article means elsewhere.

Word order is another example. A verb-first clause in Hebrew might be explained by syntax, semantics, or pragmatics, and an interpreter with only one of those tools will assume it is the one at work and may be wrong. Without some familiarity with each field, explanations easily become too simplistic or vague, as when a form is simply called "emphasized." The aim is a better understanding of the biblical languages and a firmer grasp on the truths God has conveyed through them.

The Four Areas of Study

Semantics is the study of meaning. For Angelika Kratzer, its task is to describe the features of an expression's meaning that stay the same in every context, its meaning proper. The basic unit here is the morpheme, a meaningful linguistic unit that need not be a whole word: the -ed suffix on escaped is one. At the level of the whole sentence, semantics works with truth conditions. As Heim and Kratzer put it, to know the meaning of a sentence is to know its truth conditions, that is, what the world would have to be like for it to be true.

Morphology is all about morphemes. David Embick describes a grammar as a set of primitive elements, which are morphemes, plus a system for combining them into complex structures, which is the syntax. Morphology divides into derivational morphology, which forms words (through roots, categorizers, derivational affixes, and compounding), and inflectional morphology, which marks grammatical information on words using functional morphemes. Hebrew makes roots especially visible: the same consonants appear in melek, "king," and malak, "to reign," with the vowel pattern determining the category.

Syntax is about the order of morphemes, how they combine into larger structures. Andrew Carnie describes it as the level of language between words and the meaning of sentences, the bridge between the sounds someone produces and what they intend to say. Ezra is giving his stuffed animal to a child and Is Ezra giving his stuffed animal to a child? contain exactly the same words, yet moving is to the front turns a statement into a question.

Pragmatics addresses the question "What did they mean by that?" As Birner notes in her textbook, that knowing what words mean (semantics) and how they are strung together (syntax) is not enough. We also need to know who said the sentence, in what context, and why. Her example There's one piece of pizza left can be an offer, a warning, or a scolding depending on the situation, even though none of that is said outright. The literal meaning belongs to semantics; the additional meaning belongs to pragmatics.

How the Four Fit Together

The areas are not sealed off from each other. The link between morphology, syntax, and semantics is compositionality: the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by the meanings of its parts and how they are put together. Morphology studies the parts, syntax how they are put together, and semantics the resulting meaning. So no morpheme can be analyzed in isolation. The bear escaped from the zoo describes a single event, but the bear escaped from the zoos suggests repeated escapes. The past-tense -ed has not changed; the plural morpheme on zoos produces the habitual reading.

The line between semantics and pragmatics is traditionally drawn at truth conditions. If a meaningful element affects the truth conditions of a sentence, it belongs to semantics; if it does not, it belongs to pragmatics. This lines up with the distinction between an entailment, an inference that necessarily holds if a statement is true, and an implicature, an inference drawn from the context that can be canceled. Stress pizza in There's one piece of pizza left, and a hearer may infer that something else is available to eat. The inference is real, but the truth conditions are unchanged. In real texts, the right explanation for a phenomenon may involve concepts from some or all four domains.

A Simplified Starting Point

Nearly everything in this course is simplified. Many of these concepts could fill a full semester and have far more depth than an introduction can cover. There are also different schools of thought. Formal semantics, which uses mathematical tools to analyze language, grew out of philosophy and mathematics and often begins with Gottlob Frege's work in the late 1800s and early 1900s, while cognitive linguistics has concentrated more on lexical semantics. Even the truth-conditional boundary is known to be too simplistic, though it is a useful starting point. The goal is to get a feel for the concepts and begin applying them.

How This Course Works

The course has four sections, taken in order: semantics, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. Read each lesson, then take its short quiz to check your understanding. At the end of each section, an exam reviews and draws together that section's lessons.

The lessons build on one another, so work through them in sequence: semantics introduces the morpheme, compositionality, and truth conditions; morphology examines morphemes themselves; syntax, how they combine; and pragmatics shows how all four areas work together.