Register Theory

This paper examines at how language and food intersect and interact in gentrification processes. As a capital-driven social process aiming at enhancing the socioeconomic value of urban space, gentrification implies mobility both in the sense that it attracts new people, businesses and capital to an area, and in the form of displacement of less affluent and prestigious people, businesses and semiotic resources from central to marginal urban spaces. The paper examines linguistic and visual traces of such mobilities in two neighbourhoods in Gothenburg, Sweden. Based on the observation that food and food practices are central for the production and reproduction of social distinction, the analysis centres on food related establishments and signs. In particular, it discusses the distinction-making function of prestigious languages, elite gastronomic registers, and gourmet food trucks, and how these depend on the marginalization of low status languages, popular gastronomic registers and cheap generic food carts. People's interaction with these resources contributes to the reconfiguration of social and urban space.

As a text-oriented discipline, Biblical Studies has a long history of undertaking detailed textual analyses in order to describe either the structure of an ancient text or the structural potential of an ancient register. Yet these analyses have often been under-theorized and haphazard. This paper presents findings from the early stages of a project applying systemic-functional linguistic (SFL) methods and tools to the question of structure in the apostle Paul’s extant epistles. These include the notion of generic structure potential (e.g. Hasan 1978, 1985, 1996) and the multidimensional approach to text in context (including instantiation, stratification, metafunction, realization, and logogenesis) (e.g. Halliday 2003; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004:20-31; Martin & White 2005:7-33). By applying these ideas and methods to Paul’s extant epistles, we hope to provide a rigorous, multi-stratal account of how Paul 'means' in his letters, which in turn will shed light on some general descriptive issues that continue to surround the genre of the ancient letter. The project itself challenges both disciplinary and textual boundaries, each of which will be touched on in this paper.

Firstly, the paper challenges disciplinary boundaries between biblical studies and discourse analysis, bringing the more systematic and theorized tools of systemic functional linguistics to bear on biblical texts in a way that offers new insights into old questions. Traditionally, biblical scholars have made little use of the systematic tools of discourse analysis, although some scholars (e.g. Land 2015; Lee 2010; Reed 1993, 1997; Westfall 2006) have begun to apply systemic-functional discourse analyses to biblical epistles. We hope to further highlight for biblical scholars the usefulness of this social-semiotically oriented theory.

Secondly, this paper challenges boundaries of a textual kind as it seeks new ways of describing the generic structure of Paul’s epistles. These epistles instantiate a text-type that has been studied by both classicists and biblical scholars in myriad ways (e.g. Exler 1923; Klauck 2006; Morello & Morrison 2007; Stowers 1986). A particular point of interest for biblical scholars is the ways in which Paul’s letters can be better understood when viewed in light of the letter-writing conventions of the ancient world (Porter & Adams 2010:1). A number of descriptive issues have not been fully resolved, perhaps because few explicit analyses have been performed on ancient letters. We will present the results of a preliminary analysis of clause-level features in an English translation of the original Greek text, the New American Standard Bible (NASB). The Greek text will be analysed at a later stage in the research project.

A corpus of 31,087 words was compiled, comprising five letters to early churches for which there is a general consensus of Pauline authorship (i.e. Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians and Philippians). UAM Corpus Tool was then used to annotate the texts for a range of lexicogrammatical features, including clause status, primary tense, polarity, process type, and Subject selection. A feature of UAM Corpus Tool, text stream visualization, was then used to display the selection of particular features across the text. This was applied to two of the texts (1 and 2 Corinthians) as an exploratory device to identify potential clustering of features that may suggest phase boundaries.

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