Biblical Hebrew Forum

["B. M. Rocine" <brocine AT twcny.rr.com>]

Hi Vince, It's going well.

Thanks for the point to your papers.

I wonder if you have any thoughts on what I am up to.

I am doing discourse analyses of poems.  I am generally disregarding the
lineation/meter in favor of syntax for my text segmentation.  I am doing so
on the assumption that whatever is going on in the poesy, the Hebrew is
still exactly that--Hebrew--and that the communicative purposes of the
speaker/writer are universal to life (not special to poetry).  I suspect the
meter and the sytax are two systems that flirt with each other in the poet's
art.  In fact, the meter seems to disguise the discourse structure whereas
the grammar guides the audience to it.  I am classifying clause types and
making these bracket diagrams that so far explain well the writer's
morpho-syntactic choices.    As we have found in prose, the choices are
controlled by pragmatics.  I suspect that pragmatics only gives way to meter
in the exception.

Shalom,  Bryan


> hey, bryan: how's it going, eh?
>
> my dialectology papers, not yet a mongraph--but give me time, have direct
> bearing on diachronics. in the one paper, i suggested all psalms that had
> diagnostics were post-exilic, tending to the ezra-chronicles end of the
> spectrum. i'm hoping the nunation studies will bear much fruit: stay
> tuned. (the papers referred to are online in my papers directory.)
>
> on a related note, i've been thinking about bob culley's 1970 paper on
> metre. he proposed a taxonomy based on syllable-counting profiles, but no
> one followed it up. i've been thinking that such profiles would correlate
> with my dialect profiles in an interesting way... (anyone need a thesis
> topic...?)
>
> shalom,
> vince
> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
-=-=-
> Dr Vincent DeCaen
> Adjunct Professor
> Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
> University of Toronto
> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
-=-=-
> Donner son consentement, c'est volontaire


B. M. Rocine
Living Word Church
6101 Court St. Rd.
Syracuse, NY 13206

ph: 315.437.6744
fx: 315.437.6766