From: Matthew Brook O'Donnell (m.odonnell@roehampton.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Dec 06 2000 - 05:38:12 EST
Clayton
>
> So we are talking on list now? Your previous response was private.
>
Sorry about that... intended to reply to list the first time, but my mail
client just picked up your address. Your reply came back into my BGreek mailbox
and so I replied to the list. Apologies.
> A full noun phrase used to indicate a participant is a means of
introducing
> new participants or reintroducing old participants who have not been
active
> in the discourse for a significant span or where there are a number of
> participants active and some confusion over person dexis is possible, for
> example in a dialog.
>
Yes I'd agree that this is one of the things that the use of a full
reference to a discourse participant does... but now we are talking about
discourse topic/focus or thematization NOT cohesion as in your first post. I
think concepts like Levinson's "point of departure" fit into a discussion of
theme/topic. I think my main contention is the idea that participant
cohesion is only achieved through anaphoric pronouns and zero anaphora (I
dislike the use of this term for Greek, as there IS a reference to the
participant in the morphological form unlike "said" in English--I prefer
"implied reference")
> I think it is quite possible that we are talking about discourse
> coherence from slightly different perspectives
Probably. Textual COHESION and discourse COHERENCE are not the same thing,
though related. I know Cindy Westfall has discussed this point on the list
before and a number of her articles deal with it well. Reed's article on
cohesion in the Porter & Reed DA volume does the same. He uses Halliday and
Hasan's idea of co-referential ties (participant references) creating
IDENTITY CHAINS creating cohesion.
> . Always good to hear from Roehampton. Not quite sure if this is the
> same Roehampton that I am thinking of, you know Stephanie Black,
> Cindy Westfall, Gustavo Martin, Stanley . . .
The very same. I guess one of characteristics of this approach, from Stan
from Halliday from Firth etc... is the focus upon formal features in our
analysis (see Verbal Aspect, p. 7).
I think your reading of different texts is very important and I hope to see
the practice becoming more common in exegetical and l inguistic (especially
discourse) studies of the New Testament.
I appreciate your comments.
Matt
--- B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [jwrobie@mindspring.com] To unsubscribe, forward this message to leave-b-greek-327Q@franklin.oit.unc.edu To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon Feb 11 2002 - 18:40:09 EST