A Discourse-Functional Description of Participant Reference in Biblical Hebrew Narrative

What it is about

Not read: the PDF could not be fetched. From the title and the dissertation's known approach (cognitive-functional, after Levinsohn and Givón): Runge describes how Hebrew narrative refers to participants — by full noun phrase, by name, by pronoun, or only by verb agreement — and argues that each context has a default encoding (minimal when the subject continues, a noun phrase when it switches). Departures from the default are meaningful: more encoding than needed ("over-encoding") marks a new episode, a climax or a change of perspective; less than needed marks continuity of a group of actors. Check against the text.

Ideas

• I1. (to check) Default-encoding model on the Torah trees: for each clause, record whether the subject continues from the previous clause and how it is encoded (none, pronoun, noun, name); the cross-table gives the default for each context.
• I2. (to check) Flag over-encoded subjects (a full name for an active, continuing subject) and test whether they cluster at paragraph marks or before speech.
• I3. Use the default as a coreference prior: a verb-only clause after a same-subject clause keeps the subject; after an over-encoded switch, the new referent becomes the active one.

For Mova

I1–I3 are the participant-tracking work of Discourse: narrative, speech and the shape of a text §9 and a coreference step on tools/macula trees (the coref crate's ideas carried to hbo); I2 also feeds paragraphing (§8). This is probably the most useful of the unread works; fetch it first. Re-read once the PDF is in.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{runge2007discourse,
  title = {{A Discourse-Functional Description of Participant Reference in Biblical Hebrew Narrative}},
  author = {Runge, Steven E.},
  booktitle = {SUNScholar (Stellenbosch University)},
  year = {2007},
  url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/1212}
}

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