Biblical Hebrew Forum

[clayton stirling bartholomew <c.s.bartholomew AT worldnet.att.net>]

on 1/19/01 8:38 AM, Vincent DeCaen wrote:

> last tuesday i taught a class on tagmemics, and on longacre's discourse
> grammar. i think longacre puzzles me more now than ever.
> 
> (1) despite a tip of the hat, it does not appear to me that longacre is
> doing tagmemics in any way: i.e., tagmemics as set forth in Pike (&
> Pike)'s basic statements....
> 
> (2) he has an agenda of enlisting linguistics as a new methodology against
> the bad ol' biblical criticism, especially that really bad source critical
> stuff. i find his whole work tendentious...
> 
> (3) i find you can't make much sense of his approach without knowing what
> he's doing with african languages...., i.e., some of the most obvious
> examples of languages with consecutive/sequential systems....

 Vincent,

I agree with you that R. E. Longacre's discourse grammar* is a difficult
book. However the polemic against source criticism is something that I
completely missed. Perhaps I didn't notice it because I consider source
criticism not much more than a historical curiosity. Was not aware that
people were still fighting about it. Are they?

Clay
--  
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062

*Robert E. Longacre, <<The
Grammar of Discourse>> (New York: Plenum Press, 2nd edition, 1996).