The Future of New Testament Lexicography

Abstract: In looking to the future of New Testament lexicography, it is important not only to ask about what new methods we can use, what new data we can process, or what new tools we can exploit; it is also important to critically assess the achievements of the past and the tools that we already have at our disposal. In this spirit I want to assess in this paper two of the most influential tools of structural semantics, namely (1) componential analysis and (2) relational semantics, with a discussion of how these tools have influenced New Testament lexicography, and how they can be remodelled and integrated into a distributional, corpus-based approach to lexical semantics. To situate the discussion, I will first describe some of the obstacles facing lexicographers and ideas for overcoming them. Secondly, I will review componential analysis and relational semantics and their respective roles in linguistic analysis of the New Testament. Thirdly, I will propose how these tools might be incorporated into distributional corpus analysis. Specifically, relationships between lexemes, such as synonymy, can be identified (with varying degrees of certainty) through automated distributional analysis, and these lexemes can then be ordered as hyponyms or hypernyms on the basis of the lexicalized (as opposed to conceptual or natural) components of the vocabulary. By using lexemes as components that are inherited by their hyponyms, componential analysis and relational semantics can both be fruitfully incorporated into a partially or fully automated lexicon.

Get the gist of "The Future of New Testament Lexicography" with these excerpts

"Statistical NLP holds promise for biblical studies, because it evades many of the typical problems associated with the word studies that populate most commentaries."

"Distributional corpus analysis, while avoiding key obstacles to New Testament lexicography, provides promising new directions for automated or semi- automated lexicography using word space models."

How to cite "The Future of New Testament Lexicography"

Wishart, Ryder A. “The Future of New Testament Lexicography: Remodeling Relational Semantics and Componential Analysis through Distributional Corpus Analysis.” In Linguistics and the Bible: Retrospects and Prospects, edited by Stanley E. Porter et al., 87–111. McMaster New Testament Studies 9. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019.

How to access "The Future of New Testament Lexicography"

Here is a PDF of the typesetting draft. For access to the final published version, please contact me.