ABSTRACT
John Lyons comments in his Structural Semantics, "any meaningful linguistic unit, up to and including the complete utterance, has meaning in context. The relevance of semantics to biblical interpretation was demonstrated for the first time, but demonstrated decisively, with the publication in 1961 of James Barr's epoch-making book The Semantics of Biblical Language. Neither Ferdinand de Saussure nor Barr rules out diachronic linguistics as illegitimate. Indeed it may be helpful to use diachronic study to demonstrate that the meaning of a Greek word has changed in between Plato and the New Testament. Saussure is rightly regarded as the founder of modern linguistics. He viewed language as a social and structured system, thereby preparing the way for a structural semantics. By "diachronic" linguistics Saussure means the study of language from the point of view of its historical evolution over a period of time.
