Semantic mapping of participants in legal discourse

What it is about

A method paper on the participants of the Holiness Code (Lev 17–26), where shifts between singular and plural address used to be read as seams of redaction. With the ETCBC data, Text-Fabric and Jupyter, the author (1) classifies each verb's Aktionsart in Role and Reference Grammar by a short decision procedure (causative? compatible with "is …ing"? with "vigorously"? reaches a result "in an hour"? "instantly"? "for an hour"?), (2) derives the logical structure and assigns semantic roles to the arguments by hand with that help, (3) tracks participant references manually, and (4) plots participants against roles in a bubble chart. The worked case is Lev 25:23–28 (land redemption), where the poor brother comes out less agentive than the buyer. No quantitative results; code is on GitHub.

Ideas

I1. An Aktionsart field in the Torah dictionary, filled by the paper's yes/no tests (asked once per verb lemma, stored, reused), giving state / activity / achievement / accomplishment / semelfactive ± causative.
I2. Agentivity per participant in a passage: map each argument's relation (nsubj of an activity verb, obj, obl) to a rough role scale and sum per referent; a cheap "who acts, who is acted upon" profile for law passages.
I3. Track second-person singular vs plural address in Leviticus 17–26 and Deuteronomy as a participant feature (the "Numeruswechsel"), counted from verb and suffix person/number.

For Mova

I1 goes into macula dict and The lexicon (semantic fields), and serves the world reading of events. I2 is a measure for participant tracking in 09-discourse.md. I3 is a count on the trees' FEATS for 09-discourse.md (genres: law) and a possible prag column for addressee number.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.7146/hn.v5i2.142741

@inproceedings{hojgaard2019semantic,
  title = {{Semantic mapping of participants in legal discourse}},
  author = {Højgaard, Christian Canu},
  booktitle = {HIPHIL Novum 5},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.7146/hn.v5i2.142741},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7146/hn.v5i2.142741}
}

References

9 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Joosten, Jan. 1996. People and Land in the Holiness Code: An Exegetical Study of the Ideational Framework of the Law in Leviticus 17-26. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 67. Leiden ; New York: E.J. Brill. find
Meyer, Esias Engelbertus. 2004. “The Jubilee in Leviticus 25: A Theological Ethical Interpretation from a South African Perspective.” University of Stellenbosch. find
Roorda, Dirk, Cody Kingham, Christiaan Erwich, and SeHoon Park. 2018. “Etcbc/Bhsa: Default Text Format For Lexemes.” Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1446393. ↗
Talstra, Eep. 2016. “Approaching the Mountain of Exodus 19: Thou Shalt Explore Syntax First.” HIPHIL Novum 3 (1): 2–24. find our card
———. 2018. “Who is who in Zechariah 1:1-6? Text Linguistics, Participant Tracking and the Reading of Biblical Texts.” In Reading and listening: meeting one God in many texts: Festschrift for Eric Peels on the occasion of his 25th jubilee as professor of Old Testament Studies, edited by Jaap Dekker and Geert Kwakkel, 16:151–58. Amsterdamse Cahiers voor Exegese van de Bijbel en zijn Tradities, Supplement Series. Bergambacht: 2VM. find
Van Valin, Robert D., Jr. 2005. Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
Van Valin, Robert D., Jr., and Randy J. LaPolla. 1997. Syntax: Structure, Meaning, and Function. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. find
Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai. 2008. “A Role-Lexical Module (RLM) for Biblical Hebrew: A Mapping Tool for RRG and WordNet.” In Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface, edited by Robert D. Van Valin Jr., 455–78. Studies in Language Companion Series 105. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. find
———. 2016. “How to Classify Hebrew Verbs: Plotting Verb-Specific Roles.” In Contemporary Examinations of Classical Languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek): Valency, Lexicography, Grammar, and Manuscripts, edited by Timothy Martin Lewis, Alison Salvesen, and Beryl Turner, 67–94. Perspectives on Linguistics and Ancient Languages 8. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. find

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