I have been looking into the subject of Participant Reference in narrativeI think it might be easier to look at how participants are first introduced, because this is probably the marked or less common case. Major characters are commonly introduced by lengthy formulae like "There was a man...". See for example Ruth 1:1-2, Job 1:1. In Genesis, new major characters are mostly introduced by the reports of their birth, in genealogies etc, and so need no further introduction. Minor characters are introduced more simply, often as "X son of Y" or "X of/from Z".
and wondering how the distinction between a new participant and an already
active participant is encoded in biblical Hebrew.
Beyond the obvious use of an anaphoric pronominal, what are the discourse
mechanisms used to indicate that a participant has already been activated?
In other words, when Abraham is mentioned by name the second or third or nth
time in a narrative, how does it differ from Abraham's initial introduction?
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