The best general introduction to linguistics, without particular reference to the New Testament, is still the much-cited work by John Lyons.6 Despite the usefulness of this volume, however, it does not convey the extraordinary fecundity of the discipline, nor can it, within its confines, hint at the contributions, models, and scholars in the complex and overlapping specializations that have developed: semantics, semantic field theory, discourse analysis (= textlinguistics), pragmatics, socio-linguistics,