Semantics/Semantic Neutrality in Silva's "Philippians"

This post contains quotes from an electronic version of Moises Silva's Philippians commentary in the Baker series. I have only included some of the quotes where Silva discusses the importance of semantic neutrality. He begins:

One question that arises generally in the Pauline corpus, but pointedly in Philippians, is whether the apostle intends clear semantic distinctions when similar terms are grouped together.[12] Many commentators, persuaded that Paul could not be guilty of redundancy, look for these distinctions and emphasize them. It is unfortunate, however, that the term redundancy continues to be viewed in a purely negative light. Linguists, drawing on the work of communication engineers, have long recognized that redundancy is a built-in feature of every language and that it aids, rather than hinders, the process of communication.

Though Paul is certainly not thoughtless in his choice of vocabulary, this commentary will argue that lexical distinctions are often neutralized in specific contexts and that many variations result from a need for stylistic reinforcement rather than from a desire to make an additional substantive point. Even some of the controversial terms in the Christ-hymn, I believe, are better understood if we resist sharp distinctions among them (see comments on 2:6–8). What is true of individual lexical items may also be reflected in longer linguistic units, such as the emotive phrases in 2:1, which Lightfoot (1868: 67) perceptively described as a “tautology of earnestness.”

[Philippians] 2:7. μορϕὴν . . . ὁμοιώματι . . . σχήματι: The literature dealing with these words (and such related terms as δόξα, εἶδος, εἱκών, etc.) is very extensive and covers a wide range of problems.[38] Whatever distinctions may be posited are subject to contextual adjustments, including semantic neutralization, which is most likely what we have here. It would be difficult to prove that if these three terms were interchanged, a substantive semantic difference would result. No doubt μορϕή was chosen first to provide an explicit contrast with μορϕὴ θεοῦ in verse 6; ὁμοίωμα (a close synonym to ἴσος, cf. ἴσα in v. 6) serves to delimit more precisely the range of μορϕή (that is, although μορϕή covers a very wide semantic range, only that area that overlaps with ὁμοίωμα is in view); finally σχῆμα, which has an even greater range than μορϕή, is perhaps the most useful term available to provide a general summary of what the two previous clauses have stated.