I have already come to the realization that we are very close, that the work of the grammarians is to be respected, and rejected at your own peril. My concern has been whether my work would be accepted by grammarians or not. I have something to contribute, but still have much to learn. Annotating the entire GNT has helped offset the “sloppy linguist” syndrome. Building on Levinsohn’s 30+ years of work with minority languages has saved me from innumerable pitfalls. Thanks for your contributions to this discussion. I look forward to the feedback on the HP project (gulp).

I personally do not like the labels ‘traditional’ grammarian as opposed to whatever today, however. Instead, I make a distinction between grammarians and _linguists_ as follows: grammarians start from the ground up and ask, How can this form be used? Linguists start from a meta-framework and ask, How can this language express certain ideas? Grammarians–at least those who are true to their calling–do exhaustive work within at least a particular corpus of literature and classify what they have discovered into phenomenological categories. (That’s why, by the way, I list so many genitive uses in my grammar: these uses arise out of the text of the NT and apostolic fathers and other Koine literature. They may not be particularly meaningful for a pure grammarian–indeed, if I were such, I would complain about their multiplying like rabbits in my grammar too!–but they are meaningful to those doing exegesis in the NT.)

The two weaknesses of grammarians are that (1) they often do not do exhaustive research (thus, they are not true to their calling) and then assume unaffected meanings on the basis of truncated data (e.g., the infamous prohibitive aorist/present and the barking dog story found in J. H. Moulton’s Prolegomena, or Colwell’s construction of the implications of his own rule), and (2) their approach doesn’t do much for offering predictability or presenting a holistic picture of how language functions.

The weaknesses of linguists, in my view, are: (1) they, also, often neglect all the data (see David Crystal’s famous complaint about linguists’ sloppy work in this regard in the multi-author work he edited) but nevertheless make pronouncements about how the language functions (for another example, see many of Chomsky’s universals that were later debunked); (2) they all too often misunderstand the work of grammarians. I think that most grammarians respect the work of linguists, but they regard their work as of a different nature than their own work. On the other hand, linguists don’t, as a lot, have nearly as much respect for grammarians.

I believe that we can work together if we get past these hurdles. Together we can create a sort of hermeneutical spiral, with grammarians at one pole and linguists at the other, as we work through various issues in the language of a particular corpus or era.

In these discussions, folks forget or overlook the distinction you make between affected and unaffected meaning; possibly they never got it in the first place. As you said, this kind of confusion is not uncommon using these labels. I think this interaction here has benefited me, clarifying the matter in my own mind. I will take more care in citations to retain “affected” as a modifier.

Fundamentally, I think the main difference between our approaches to grammar concerns the primary level at which we conduct most of our exegesis. I tend to look at higher-level phenomenon, presupposing that a closer, more rigorous analysis is performed at some point to attend to the details. I have no doubt that you move your way up the levels as well. However, most of our ink seems to be spilled on different levels. Most of my preaching concerns a pericope, helping people understand how the text flows and hangs together. In that sense, I will tend to major there, and not provide much granular discussion unless there is a significance to it. I have done the same in my blog. Perhaps I need to strike a better balance.

I have seen that most students and pastors are well served by the traditional approach to grammar, when it comes to detailed word or clause level analysis. Things get a bit more unsure as we move up the level of analysis. I doubt this is a problem at DTS (or Bible Baptist Seminary with Captain Decker at the wheel). However, for many this level is a troublesome area. Although this blog has an academic flavor to it, I am am more focused on these guys than on the scholar.

In talking about high-level patterns, it is nearly impossible to attend to every nuance, permutation, implication or detail along the way and actually accomplish anything. Having said that, I also need to be specific enough to prevent confusion over what I am claiming.

I will be describing principles in the discussion of the historical present. These principles will need to be brought to bear and weighed based on the contextual factors of lexeme, genre, etc., just like any other principle of grammar. Hopefully the discussion can be understood in that way, and not as universal rules.