Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryan Rocine" <596547 AT ican.net>]

Hi Dave,

I don't blame you for wanting elegance, so I'll take a try:  I grant that a
discourse can begin with a sequential form.  You do not.  That's the sum of
our disagreement concerning Gen 42:8.  I did say in my last post "if we can
grant that a sequential form can begin a discourse which the wayyiqtol
plainly does."  

Now for the long-winded stuff:  Why can I grant it?  Because of the
principle of communicative cooperation that exists between writer and
audience.  When a writer begins a discourse (or a back-loop) with a
wayyiqtol, he counts on his audience to assume an unstated cause for this
first event.  see Traugott and Pratt _Linguistics for Students of
Literature_ Any narrative that begins, first sentence, with direct speech
is a good example, e.g., the first sentence of Twain's "The Undertaker's
Chat": "Now that corpse," said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of
the deceased approvingly, "was a brick--every way you took him he was a
brick." 

Or for something more BH-specific, you might want to check out Anderson's
"Salience, Implicature, Ambiguity, and Redundancy in Clause-Clause
Relationships in BH" in _BH and Discourse Linguistics_, ed. Bergen.  One of
Anderson's points is that, in real life, events unfold in a multitude of
temporal relationships, but that in narration, the writer is constrained by
having to represent the various temporal relationships in a
one-clause-at-a-time reading process--quite a challenge!   Anderson's
concept of "implicature" is akin to the above mentioned "principle of
cooperation."

A little point of clarification:  I don't know of discourse analysists
bending over backwards to prove wayyiqtol is either perfective or
sequential.  Usually the focus is more on pragmatics than verbal semantics.
 I'm just talking here (in these threads on verbal semantics), you
know?--e-mail style!  ;-)   Bryan Rocine's jabbering does not represent the
field!
<the noise of loud cheering comes from the offices of discourse analysts
everywhere>  ;-)

Shalom,
Bryan



B. M. Rocine
Associate Pastor
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13208

315-437-6744(w)
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