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Description:
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This book, The Development of Textlinguistics in the Writings of Robert
Longacre, brings together Robert Longacre's articles on textlinguistics and
discourse analysis scattered throughout journals and books. The fifteen
articles selected here deal with his theory and its application to Old
Testament Biblical Hebrew and New Testament Greek as well as to English.
Longacre's theory of textlinguistics focuses on the intersection of the
morphosyntax and discourse structure. He studies a language at the level of
discourse and at all its possible interfaces with lower levels of grammar
from morpheme and word to phrase, clause, sentence, and paragraph. Two
important theoretical concepts in his holistic approach, salience scheme
and peak in profile, are discussed in relation to normal surface structure
grammatical features as well as the off-norm, unusual, peak-marking
features. The theoretical selections include six articles, starting from
the need for discourse analysis, to the presentation of basic concepts of
textlinguistics based on the two building blocks of language, the VPs and
NPs, and to reported dialogue and the paragraph. The nine application
articles provide insights into understanding the functions of tense,
aspect, and modality, particles, nouns and pronouns, and other features of
grammar in distinct types of discourse. Diverse texts are analyzed in the
articles of this volume, such as the Flood Narrative of Genesis, Mark's
Gospel, 1 John, a fund-raising letter, and a novel. In the face of
historical textual criticism, his scripture analyses show the textual unity
of biblical texts leading to better understanding of the content.
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