Great Divide

Ilvgrammta at aol.com Ilvgrammta at aol.com
Wed Sep 20 07:59:15 EDT 2000


In a message dated 00-09-20 00:16:13 EDT, c.s.bartholomew at worldnet.att.net 
writes:

<< The major semantic and pragmatic goals of an author/text can be grasped 
even
 in an ancient language text without recourse to a lot of low level analysis.
 Why? Because natural language texts are typically very very redundant. When
 Paul wants to say something in a letter he often  says it several different
 times in several different ways. You can discover Paul's semantic and
 pragmatic goals by reading the whole letter or more than one letter and you
 can gain this understanding without giving a lot of attention to low level
 formal language features. >>

Clayton,

I know that we have had our differences over this issue and that we too are 
separated by galactic clusters and superclusters when it comes to the study 
of language and literary texts. But I assure you that I have tried the 
approach you suggest and it did not yield the results I was looking for, in 
my opinion. Furthermore, I have read a number of discourse treatments dealing 
with various books of the Bible and most of the papers I have read either, in 
trying to avoid low-level analysis, do not answers the questions that I have 
concerning the text or come to the same conclusion that I have arrived at 
using low-level analysis. On particular essay I have in mind is Robert 
Longacre's essay entitled "Towards an Exegesis of 1 John Based on Discourse 
Analysis of the Greek Text."

In this paper, Longacre concludes that 1 John's message is clear. The Epistle 
is basically telling us that being a Christian requires both "doctrinal and 
ethical commitments" and it also requires belief in Jesus as the Son of God 
and true Christianity also demands that true Christians love one another and 
God.

While I think that Longacre's discourse treatment is definitely valuable and 
well-written--I could have (and I have!) gleaned all of the aforementioned 
without analyzing the macrostructure of the text. And Longacre is but one 
example that I could cite in this regard. So while I am not denigrating in 
any way, discourse-analysis, I am militating against those who want to 
downplay low-level analysis. 

Lastly, while writers can be redundant, I have also observed another 
linguistic phenomenon when reading great works of literature. A number of 
writers also purposely try to avoid redundancy. How do we deal with these 
kind of books?

Regards,
Edgar Foster



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