This dissertation focusses on the theoretical base, and accompanying methodologies, required for text-linguistic analysis of Biblical Hebrew texts, and the degree of clarity required for communication of the results. After a brief theoretical introduction, and explanation of a few common terms, two chapters are devoted to interacting with five works which concern themselves to some degree with this issue (including works by Niccacci, Eskhult, Andersen, Khan, and Longacre). Longacre's book was used as a springboard to launch into an introduction to the tagmemic school of text-linguistics (or "discourse analysis"); my intention has been to contribute explanations in plain English of some of the fundamental concepts of this model, in order that hebraists may make more use of its considerable benefits. In particular, Longacre's identification of several possible text-types (which free us from trying to describe Reported Speech as a single text-type with extremely flexible rules), and of the correlation of a scale of foregrounded to backgrounded clause-types for each significant text-type, promises to streamline description of Hebrew considerably. The next two chapters apply these concepts to biblical texts taken from Judges, Leviticus, Exodus, and Ruth. In these chapters, several text-types are confirmed, and their verb ranking identified. Reported Speech is found to have a slight modifying influence on these text-types, but it is suggested that this is due to internal cohesion with the speech formula into which it is embedded (contra Niccacci).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:649234 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Dawson, David Allan |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19674 |
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