Interaction in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: A Conversation-Analytic Approach

What it is about

The full text is not in the library (embargoed); this card rests on the repository abstract, and its ideas are provisional. The thesis applies Conversation Analysis to the dialogues of Biblical Hebrew narrative. Its claims: reading dialogue well needs competence in the conventions of conversation of the culture and the language; the reader should attend to how the narrator describes the speaking (the quotative frame); each turn should be read for what it is doing (its pragmatic aim) as well as for its form; and the meaning lies in sequences of turns (question and answer, request and compliance or refusal), not in single lines.

Ideas

• I1. Give prag a sequence layer: for each quote, link it to the previous quote by a different speaker as its first pair part (question → answer, request → compliance/refusal, accusation → defence, offer → acceptance), and count the pair types in the Torah. A turn that does not fit its first pair part (an answer that is not an answer) is a marked turn worth a flag.
• I2. Treat the quotative frame as data: record per quote the verb of saying (אָמַר, דִּבֶּר, עָנָה, קָרָא, צִוָּה), whether לֵאמֹר follows, and whether the addressee is named; then test whether עָנָה marks a second pair part more often than אָמַר.

For Mova

I1 is an extension of the speech carrying already in tools/macula/src/prag.rs (quotes and speakers are cut there), with the tally in Discourse: narrative, speech and the shape of a text (direct speech). I2 is a count on the Torah trees for 09-discourse.md (direct speech and לֵאמֹר); see also the Miller-Naudé 2026 card on quotative frames.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17863/cam.135624

@inproceedings{patty2026interaction,
  title = {{Interaction in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: A Conversation-Analytic Approach}},
  author = {Patty, Tyler},
  booktitle = {Apollo (University of Cambridge)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.17863/cam.135624},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17863/cam.135624}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2026-patty-interaction-biblical-hebrew-narrative-conversation/