Abstract
In this study, we offer an exploratory factor analysis of three corpora of Greek texts from the Hellenistic era. We draw generalizations from the data about some of the chief patterns of morphosyntactic variation within these texts, under the theoretical assumption that these patterns are indicative of register variation. This variation realizes changes in the situational contexts that gave rise to each of the texts. We ultimately find that both our smaller corpus and our larger corpus indicate the same major factors of variation. We argue these patterns thus represent generalized situational parameters useful for characterizing these texts. At the same time, since these patterns are not reproduced through examination of the intra-textual chapters or sections of the generally balanced book, the Epistle to the Romans, we have argued that situational parameters are realized by the ratios of entire texts, as semantic units, rather than portions of texts, which are components of those units. The papyri and ostraca in our third corpus introduce a third level of analysis, allowing for a gradient distinction between literary and non-literary texts. This study serves as a point of reference for future analysis and demonstrates that intra-text units, such as the episode, chapter, or pericope, are not the correct units of analysis for identifying situational parameters, since such units are not indicative of the patterns of register variation observed across multiple corpora.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Breakdown of the Hellenistic Corpus by Text
The table in this appendix offers a summary of the documents from Celano’s lemmatized corpus that fall within the range of the Hellenistic period, approximately 400 BCE to 400 CE (https://github.com/gcelano/LemmatizedAncientGreekXML). The names of authors and works and the word counts associated with each work have been generated from the metadata in Celano’s texts, and thus many of the titles are in Latin, and some of the works have no associated author. The word counts, too, should be seen as approximate, as the data has in some cases not been edited. The texts of the New Testament corpus can be found below, as they form part (approximately 1.5%) of the Hellenistic corpus. The papyri and ostraca texts are too numerous for this format, but more information can be found in its associated paper (Celano 018) (Table 8).
Appendix 2: Example Papyri
These example papyri can be found at Papyri.info along with full explanation of transcription and markup conventions. These examples occupy extremes along dimension one of the papyri corpus. O.Stras 1.678, an ostracon recording economic transactions, has a negative 4.87 correlation with dimension one, making it an example of the documentary end of the documentary versus relational axis. CPR 5.20, a papyrus letter, has a positive 4.33 correlation, making it an example of the relational end.
O.Stras 1.678 (Second century (uncertain))
CPR 5.20 (Third–fourth century (uncertain))
Appendix 3: Sections of Romans Related to Each Corpus
This appendix contains maps and tables specifying exact coordinates of how the five sections of Romans are distributed within each of the three corpora used in this study. The tables indicate how far above or below the axis each section falls for each dimension. For example, the opening of Romans scores 9.18 on the first dimension of variation, represented by the x-axis in Fig. 11.
Principal component analysis of New Testament texts with distribution of Romans sections overlaid
See Figs. 12 and 13; Tables 9, 10, and 11
Principal component analysis of papyri and ostraca texts with distribution of Romans sections overlaid
Principal component analysis of Hellenistic texts with distribution of Romans sections overlaid
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Porter, S.E., Wishart, R.A. (2020). Register Variation in Hellenistic Greek: Factor Analysis of Quantitative Linguistic Patterns. In: Yang, B., Li, W. (eds) Corpus-based Approaches to Grammar, Media and Health Discourses. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4771-3_6
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