Historical linguists investigate those contexts that are considered to be most relevant to language change, given the theoretical approach adopted and the phenomena to be investigated. The topic of this chapter is usage-based perspectives on language-internal change, especially as conceptualized in the frameworks of research on grammaticalization, semantic-pragmatic change, and diachronic construction grammar. Contexts may be immediate, local “co-texts” or wider linguistic discourse contexts. Contexts tend to be wide and discursive as change begins to occur and local after it has occurred. I discuss the roles in enabling change of ambiguity, of pragmatic inferencing, and of “assemblies of discursive uses” such as have been proposed in work on constructionalization. With respect to contexts for “actualization,” the step-by-step language-internal spread (or loss) of a change that has occurred, focus is on host-class expansion and on the often analogy-driven changes across contexts, especially as revealed in corpus work.

This chapter considers more popular and experiential receptions of the Bible, in its various canonical and material manifestations, in faith communities. It examines communal engagement with biblical texts in liturgy and prayer, actualizations of the Bible in the praxis of believers and faith communities, and how the Bible functions in ecumenical dialogue and in wider interfaith conversations.

Although signed pseudonymously, The Sickness unto Death is taken to reflect Kierkegaard’s authorized view of the value and content of the religious life. This chapter argues that the ideal of religiosity that Kierkegaard develops it in this text is primarily existential, namely focused on the believer’s way of living in the world. To demonstrate this, a detailed analysis of Kierkegaard’s conception of selfhood is presented. Distinguishing between “being a self” and “becoming the self that one is intended by God to be,” it is shown how the latter is achieved by way of living correctly. While one’s quality of selfhood – the quality that makes one a self, an individual – is possessed in a state of potential, the actualization of this potential is a function of one’s worldly existence. There is therefore a tight connection between unfulfilled life, unfulfilled self, and unfulfilled relationship with God. And on the other hand, one “rests transparently” in God (in Kierkegaard’s words), when one becomes the self that God intends one to be. And we become who God intends us to be by living correctly.

Chapter 4 sketches how the contribution of ordinary language philosophers like Ryle, Kenny and Vendler to linguistic semantics has added to persistent terminological confusion. Their delivery of the Aristotelian legacy to linguistics consists of a sort of naive physical ontology at the cost of the principle of compositionality. The misleading translation of Greek verb forms occurring in the crucial passus of Metaphysics 1048b into the English Progressive Form will be argued to have been decisive for what natural (language) philosophy handed to linguists: an outdated vision on motion. The chapter also sketches the heavy work of a verb in taking all sorts of different arguments and argues that features are insufficient for the semantics of tense and aspect: they should be used as abbreviatory and for convenience only.