Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

Sorry, Vincent, but regrettably I am not qualified to defend, or otherwise,
my SIL colleagues on this topic. I have great respect for their work, but
not deep enough understanding.

You have to understand their attitude towards source criticism from the
evangelical Christian viewpoint. At a guess, Longacre would have preferred
to ignore it, as a method orthogonal to his own, but was challenged to face
up to it by criticism from the source critics. Of course the sources of the
material are irrelevant to the discourse approach if you accept that the
work has been compiled and redacted by a skilful author, rather than thrown
together at random as some source critics seem to imply happened. On the
other hand, a recognition that unexpected things in the text may have a
discourse function e.g. to mark peak rather undermines the evidence used for
dividing the material into sources.

By the way, Dr Kenneth Pike passed away on 31st December. There is an
appreciation on www.sil.org.

Peter Kirk

-----Original Message-----
From: Vincent DeCaen [mailto:decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca]
Sent: 19 January 2001 16:39
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: longacre and tagmemics...?


sholom, b-haverim,

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....

anyone interested in pursuing this discussion along these or related
lines?

V--
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Dr Vincent DeCaen     <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>
c/o Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, 4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor
University of Toronto, Toronto ON, CANADA, M5S 1A1

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative, www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/hsei/
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Love work. Hate authority.  --Shemaiah, from Avot