Distribution of Semantic Domain by Section in Pastoral Epistles

For purposes of examining the distribution of semantic domains within the text of the Pastoral Epistles, I've split the text up into sections. These sections are representative of the section breaks in the NA27 text.

I wrote code to count the occurrences of each domain in each section. I wanted to see which domains were most frequent in each section. This information will come in handy when I look at the text from the discourse level. I don't plan on doing a full-on discourse analysis; but it will be interesting to track the primary topics of discussion against the most frequent semantic domains in each section.

Every domain that occurs two times or more in a given section is listed. Some sections that are fairly short have no entries in this list (e.g. Tt §13). Please note that I've only encoded content-bearing words with semantic domain information. That means only nouns, verbs and adjectives are accounted for. Yes, I should do adverbs too at some point; perhaps that will come later. Perhaps not.

Some interesting items: You can see that the same domains occur in the epistolary salutations for all three letters. You can also see that Domain 33, communication, is popular throughout. Also, Domain 93, Names of Persons and Places, is frequent in the salutations and conclusions of the letters.

If this sort of thing interests you, you may also be interested in my Concordance of the Pastoral Epistles Ordered by Semantic Domain

This work is Copyright 2005 R.W. Brannan. All rights reserved.