‘Control’ in Pauline Language and Culture: A Study of Rom 6

Abstract

Certainly since the groundbreaking work of Ferdinand de Saus-sure, the social character of language has been axiomatic for most linguists. Saussure writes: ‘The structure of a language is a social product of our language faculty. At the same time, it is also a body of necessary conventions adopted by society to enable members of society to use their language faculty.’ Eugene Nida and Johannes Louw, writing in the supplement to their New Testament lexicon, acknowledge the connection between their treatment of semantics and sociology, but they refrain from specifying what they think the relationship between language and society to be. Nida is somewhat more forthcoming in his study of componential analysis when he writes:There are analogies between the structure of a culture and the semantic structure of a corresponding language, but there is no set of one-to-one correspondences. A language must be free to describe a variety of possibilities, including those which have not as yet entered the culture. Nevertheless, the language does reflect in certain aspects of its semantic structure those aspects of the culture which for one reason or another have become salient in the lexical contrasts.