Stephen Levinsohn is a linguist with SIL, and it is well worth the effort (sometimes significant) to understand his cross-linguistic approach to discourse. I cannot say that I fully understand it, but I am lucky in that Steve Runge is a friend of mine and has an office right next to mine at Logos.

Anyway, Steve Runge blogs that Stephen H. Levinsohn’s self-instruction materials for narrative and non-narrative discourse are now online.

These materials include “a passage-by-passage and verse-by-verse exposition of discourse features” for 1 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 1 Corinthians 1-4 and Luke 22 and Luke 6:20-49. I’ve worked through portions of the First Timothy notes in the past and can commend it to you. You’ll need both the narrative and non-narrative self-instruction materials as he references them heavily.

Note that Levinsohn’s focus is in providing materials for translators to use to understand and translate the text; he isn’t necessarily providing exegesis for you to consume, he’s helping translators think about and understand the discourse structure of the text. I’ll end with Steve Runge’s caveat:

One note of caution. Stephen is a very precise scholar. Generally speaking, if he cannot account for 95-100% of the data of a given feature, then he does not feel that he has not properly described it. I am [Steve Runge is] aiming for the 80-90% range, since there seems to be a fairly high fatality rate in covering the last 10%. In other words, it becomes so technical in the final leg that many give up the ghost rather than pushing ahead. It’s not really a death march, it just feels like it. My introductions are intended to acclimatize folks before they move off to attempt the summit. When I was doing my doctoral studies there was no concise introduction to the field, most works assumed a horrific amount of background. Hopefully I am bridging that gap.

I commend Levinsohn’s work to you, particularly the self-teaching materials. By all means read and see how languages tend to operate, what principles they follow. It will greatly enhance your ability to think productively about English, Greek, or most any other thing.