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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009
A cursory view of the classification of the figures by some prominent grammarians of New Testament Greek reveals a quite confusing picture. In his monumental work A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the light of historical research (1919), A. T. Robertson deals with certain ‘grammatical’ figures of speech in his discussion of the sentence (chapter 10, 390–445). The ‘remaining’ figures are dealt with in chapter 22 under the heading: Figures of Speech (1194–1208), and they are divided into figures of idea or thought (σχήματα δıανοίας, 1198–1199) and figures of expression (σήματα λήξεως, 1199–1208).
[1] Mixed, that is, only certain lexical units correspond while the syntactic structure of both phrases is the same.
[2] The shift consists in the question being answered by the same person.
[3] This principle applies mainly to poetry, where the limitation on the length of lines is an important factor. Certain figures of speech, however, are also concerned with matters of relative length, e.g. proverbs, riddles and aphorisms. Brevity here is not obtained by omitting certain lexical units, but by conveying the maximum information by means of the minimum amount of lexical units.
