Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kirk Lowery <KirkLowery AT xc.org>]

Bryan Rocine wrote:

> a friend wrote off-list
> that he didn't see any great descriptive power to seeing some off-the-line
> constructions in historical narrative as mainlines within embedded
> discourses or, as suggested by our friend Vince, as sub-mainlines.

Just a general comment on discourse theory: Longacre's theory of narrative
discourse uses the metaphor or a drama or play to describe grammatical 
elements
at the text-level.

While his whole idea of plot development (which is straight out of literary
criticism) for forgrounded/on-line clauses was heuristically very powerful, 
the
"off-line" concepts didn't have the same power that plot development has had 
for
on-line clauses. I'm not surprised that your friend didn't see
"background/off-line" as useful. Historically, background started out as a
"garbage can category" only negatively defined: "not foreground."

I presently group clauses in narratives into three notional categories:
foreground, direct speech, "background." Direct speech is important for 
telling
the reader the motivations and characteristics of the actors. What's left is
often clauses which set the time and space dimensions of the succeeding scenes
and episodes as the plot moves forward. It's still a garbage can category (but
much smaller! :-)

As for procedural (and other types) of discourse (a la Longacre), we need a 
lot
more analysis of those text types--just like we've focused on narrative these
past 15 years--before we can describe the syntax of "mainline, non-mainline"
clauses in the text. And of course, we can't assume that there is even an
analogous mainline/non-mainline distinction in those other genres (although 
the
probably is high that there is *something*.)

Blessings,

Kirk
_____________________________________________________________________________
Kirk E. Lowery, Ph.D.                              voice: (215) 572-3845
Associate Director of Academic Computing             fax: (215) 887-5404
Adjunct Professor of Old Testament                 email: <KirkLowery AT xc.org>
Westminster Theological Seminary              
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