This is another in a series of posts on meta-comments that began with this introduction. It is taken from a paper that I just presented to the Evangelical Theological Society, and is part of a forthcoming discourse grammar. I fly home tomorrow, and should get back to posting more regularly. I am still making a final editing pass on the paper before I post it on the publications page with my other papers and articles. Here is the text under consideration.

Meta-comments are often used to create a mitigated form of command, one that makes the point less directly than an imperative verb form.[1] Recall that there are two identifying criteria:

  • the suspension of what was being said in order to comment on what is about to be said, and
  • the ability to remove the meta-comment without substantially changing the propositional content.

The first few examples will illustrate this usage to mitigate an exhortation. This will be followed by examples illustrating their use to strengthen the force of a command.

This verse introduces an inferential principle drawn from the preceding discourse, essentially describing what the audience ought to do in response to what precedes. Paul has stopped his exhortation in order to state that he exhorts the Romans to do something: to present their bodies as living sacrifices. Instead of using the meta-comment, he could have more easily commanded them, “Present your bodies…” using an imperative or hortatory subjunctive.[2] The pragmatic effect of the meta-comment in this context is to attract extra attention to the proposition that it introduces. It also serves to ‘mitigate’ or lessen the severity of an exhortation.[3]


 [1] Levinsohn, referring to meta-comments as a kind of ‘orienter’, states, “Orienters often introduce exhortations in Greek. The exhortations themselves are most often expressed in infinitival clauses, though they may be encoded as imperatives (see below) or final clauses. Some orienters act as mitigating expressions. Others provide motivation for obeying the exhortations and may even highlight them.” Stephen H. Levinsohn, Self-instruction materials on Non-Narrative Discourse Analysis (Online URL at https://mail.jaars.org/~bt/nonnarr.zip, 2007), 84.

[2] The prepositional phrase διὰ τῶν οἰκτιρμῶν τοῦ θεοῦ ‘through the mercies of God’ could be construed either as part of the meta-comment (i.e. describing the basis on which Paul makes his exhortation), or as a spatial frame of reference for the proposition that it introduces (cf. Steven E. Runge, Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction for Teaching and Exegesis (Bellingham: Logos Bible Software, Forthcoming), Section 11.2. For this reason it has been excluded from the meta-comment annotation. The analysis of the prepositional phrase does not affect the reading of παρακαλῶ ὑμᾶς as a meta-comment in any case.

[3] Cf. Levinsohn Non-narrative, 79-89.