6 David I. Yoon prominence is a semantic description of a linguistic element based on observable deviations of normal patterns of marked/unmarked elements in relation to a particular discourse6. In addition, the term foregrounding, which is sometimes lumped into this discussion, will be discussed in the next section on levels of prominence. In summary, prominence is “the means by which speakers/authors draw the listener/reader’s attention to important topics and motifs of the discourse and support these topics with other less-prominent material”7. Halliday defines prominence as “linguistic highlighting, whereby some feature of the language of a text stands out in some way”8. Authors may utilize various linguistic features of their language to highlight parts of the discourse they want to emphasize. However, prominence should not be considered as merely noting where there is an instance of “departure, deflection or deviance from a standard linguistic pattern”9, relegating it to a mere statistical analysis, but it should involve investigating the function of deviations within the discourse. In other words, it is not merely counting cards, although counting cards is indeed a part of it; it involves interpreting the actual significance of those cards in its general context. B. Criteria for Determining Prominence in Hellenistic Greek10 In this paper, I want to identify four basic criteria for determining prominence in Hellenistic Greek. Because of my systemic-functional 6 Cf. Porter, “Prominence,” 52. He states that markedness refers to “formal characteristics,” in comparison with grounding, which refers to “semantic significance.” Porter identifies various categories of markedness in a linguistic system: material, implicational, distributional, positional, and cognitive markedness (57), which refer to formal characteristics of a linguistic system. I agree, in this sense, that prominence can be seen as a semantic realization of various markedness categories in a linguistic system. 7 Reed, Philippians, 105–106. Other helpful definitions include: “those semantic and grammatical elements of discourse that serve to set aside certain subjects, ideas or motifs of the author as more or less semantically and pragmatically significant than others” (Reed, Philippians, 106; Jeffrey T. Reed and Ruth A. Reese, “Verbal Aspect, Discourse Prominence, and the Letter of Jude,” FN 9 [1996] 186); and “the use of devices that languages have which enable a speaker to highlight material or make some part of the text stand out in some way” (Cynthia Long Westfall, A Discourse Analysis of the Letter to the Hebrews: The Relationship between Form and Meaning [LNTS 297: London: 2005] 31). 8 M.A.K. Halliday, Explorations in the Functions of Language (ELS; London: 1973) 113. 9 Porter, “Prominence,” 52. 10 I use the phrase Hellenistic Greek here instead of, say, New Testament Greek because, as Deissmann has shown, the Greek in the New Testament is not a unique language limited to that corpus, but the common language in that time period, as evidenced by the various documentary and literary papyri dated around the same time period. Cf. e.g., Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, 62.