forground & background, boundry markers-Longacre'sModel
Kimmo Huovila
kimmo.huovila at helsinki.fi
Tue Nov 6 10:53:44 EST 2001
c stirling bartholomew wrote:
>
> On page 100 Heimerdinger* concludes his critique of R. Longacre's
> treatment of foreground and background in narrative with a statement which
> should strike terror into the hearts of a few Ph.D. candidates:
>
> ". . . the notion of foreground cannot be seen as grammaticalized in Old
> Hebrew."
>
That is probably true, if you are looking for one single grammatical
element reliably describing grounding. But what needs to be borne in
mind is that grounding _correlates_ with _various_ grammatical elements.
It should indeed be possible to study grounding based on grammatical
indicators. For quite a good, but hard-to-get reference for theoretical
background and demonstration of the usefulness of this claim, I would
refer to Brita Wårvik's unpublished licenciate thesis named "On
Grounding in Narrative: A Survey of Models and Criteria'. It was written
in Åbo Akademi University.
Kimmo
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