'So Brothers': Pauline Use of the Vocative
"'So Brothers': Pauline Use of the Vocative" was presented at the SBL 2007 Annual Meeting, in the Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics section, co-authored with Steve Runge. It set out to describe the pragmatic effect of the vocative case in Paul's letters (with some comments on the general epistles, though not narrative texts), starting from the traditional grammatical view — going back to Robertson (1919), Blass-Debrunner-Funk (1961), Rogers (1984), and Banker (1984) — that the vocative simply identifies or characterizes the addressee, or marks the boundary of a pericope.
Rather than argue from grammar alone, the talk used an empirical, corpus-based methodology: syntactic search against the OpenText.org syntactically-analyzed Greek New Testament in Logos Bible Software, applied to a corpus of 172 vocative-containing verses (109 from the Pauline epistles), with manual analysis of attributes like vocative placement and semantic redundancy. After filtering out cases the traditional account already explains well, a majority of instances remained unaccounted for — leading to a proposed pragmatic framework in which the vocative also functions as a "forward-pointing attention getter," signaling an upcoming exhortation (an imperative or hortatory subjunctive) or a meta-comment that introduces a new proposition, alongside its role in thematically re-characterizing the addressee.