+verb SUBJECT +verb +sentence
+finite +nominal +S-comp -interrog.
etc. etc. etc. etc.
TOPIC +article SUBJECT +finite
+wh-phrase +noun +nominal +transitiv
etc. etc. etc. etc.
+article +article
+noun +noun
etc. etc.
what do you think she did2
____________________
1Ibid., p. 114.
2Hudson, Arguments for a Non-Transformational
Grammar, p. 119.
One will immediately notice the difference from
traditional types of grammars, in that this specifies, in
a matrix underneath the functional unit, the features of
that unit. Thus, in tagmemic terms, one is given the slot
and then the filler. This is in line with what tagmemics
does, although this writer does consider a feature list
more sophisticated and descriptively accurate than a mere
listing of the grammatical class (N, NP, Adj., etc.) as
given in the filler slot in tagmemics. Perlmutter is
correct when he notes that relational grammars add another
dimension to the linear order and dominance type
approaches of most grammars, instead it focuses on
inter-unital relations on the same level (sister rather
than daughter relationships).1 Tagmemics initially
divides the sentence in a manner comparable to the way
daughter-dependency (viz., VSO) rather than as
transformational grammar (viz., VP + NP, where VP is
composed of a V and an O).2 On a very pragmatic level,
tagmemics specifies four features about each constituent
(slot, filler, role/case, cohesion). These features are
usually listed diagonally above (slot) and below (role)
____________________
1David Perlmutter, Studies in Relational Grammar 1
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. ix.
2R. A. Hudson, English Complex Sentences: An
Introduction to Systematic Grammar (Amsterdam:
North-Holland Publishing Co., 1971), pp. 21-22.
the tree diagram lines and at the node (filler class [N,
V, Adj etc.]). Hudson's dependency grammar lists all
features columnically at the node. A columnic node list
allows for the inclusion of other features (viz.,
parsings) which are not normally specified in the tagmemic
above/below branch-line display technique. Relational
grammar is helpful because of its focus on sister
relations. These relations will be monitored in the
cohesion box of the tagmeme.
Pragmalinguistics
A recent linguistic "school" called pragmatics or
pragmalinguistics has added support to the procedure taken
in this dissertation--that non-grammatical information
(historical situation and setting, as well as genre and
ideational patterns) is important to the total meaning
package of a text. Pragmatics seems to be based on the
works of Austin,1 and Searle,2 although neither of these
men have employed the term.3 While this field of study is
____________________
1J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1962).
2J. R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969); and "A Classification of Illocutionary Acts,"
Language in Society 5:1 (1976):1-23.
3For a very extensive bibliography of this field
vid., Jer Verschueren, Pragmatics: An Annotated
Bibliography (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1978); or a
work edited by Herman Parret, Marina Sbisa, and Jef
Verschueren, Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics:
rather anomalous and undefinable at present,1 it may be
seen as an attempt to describe the functions and uses to
which speech acts (rather than sentences) are put--
influencing another's intentions, goals, actions, or even
beliefs. Thus pragmatics addresses the broader
communication process as it relates to the function of
language in specific speech acts.2 That is, how is
language used? In pragmatics it is not enough only to
describe what type of rhetorical device is used but one
must also note how this device actually functions in the
communication process between the speaker and the
hearer.3
This approach is contrasted with a strictly
structuralistic-text-limited methodology which inseparably
____________________
Proceedings of the Conference on Pragmatics Urbino, July
8-14, 1979 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1981), pp.
799-831; as well as the journals Pragmatics Microfiche,
Journal of Pragmatics, and Pragmatics and Beyond.
1Parret, "Introduction," in Possibilities and
Limitations of Pragmatics, pp. 7-8.
2Hugo Verdaasdonk, "Concepts of Acceptance and the
Basis of a Theory of Texts," in Pragmatics of Language and
Literature, ed. Teun A. van Dijk (Amsterdam: North-Holland
Publishing Co., 1976), p. 184; Jacob Mey, "Introduction,"
in Pragmalinguistics: Theory and Practice, p. 10; Franz
Guenther and Christian Rohrer, "Introduction: Formal
Semantics, Logic and Linguistics," in Studies in Formal
Semantics: Intensionality, Temporality, Negation, ed.
Franz Guenther and Christian Rohrer (Amsterdam:
North-Holland Publishing Co., 1978), p. 1.
3Verdaasdonk, "Concepts of Acceptance and the Basis
of a Theory of Texts," p. 196.
locks text and form to meaning.1 Pragmatics tries to
isolate scientifically how speaker/hearer situation,
intention, as well as text and contexts influence what the
speech act means or is designed to accomplish.
Pragmatics, then, attempts to isolate the differences
between sentences which are phonetically equivalent but
used in diverse ways. For example, if one says "Take a
seat, here," note how differently it is understood
depending on whether it is a cordial invitation, a strict
order, a question, or a piece of reflective advice.2
Pragmatics distinguishes between the following three parts
of a speech act: (1) locution (the simple utterance
itself in terms of syntactic and semantic well-formedness
and content); (2) illocution (what the speech act is
intended to do); and (3) perlocutionary effect (what
effect it actually does have on the hearer).3 Thus, one
____________________
1Francois Latraverse and Suzanne Leblanc, "On the
delimitation of semantics and the characterization of
meaning: Some remarks," Possibilities and Limitations of
Pragmatics, p. 401.
2Geoffrey Leech, "Pragmatics and converstational
rhetoric," in Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics,
pp. 418-19. Cf. also "You are going to leave" as a
statement, question and command (Paul Gochet, "How to
combine speech act theory with formal semantics: A new
account of Searle's concept of proposition," in
Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics, p. 252.
3Samuel R. Levin, "Concerning What Kind of Speech
Act a Poem Is," in Pragmatics of Language and Literature,
p. 144; Franz Hundsnurscher, "On Insisting," in Possibilities
and Limitations of Pragmatics, p. 344; and Arild Utaker,
"Semantics and the Relation between Language and
may utter the locution "Look out," with the illocutionary
intent to "warn" (desiring that the individual duck), but
have the actual perlocutionary effect of paralyzingly
alarming the hearer. Pragmatics isolates and examines
each of these aspects of speech. It seems to this writer
that such studies will hold rich rewards for biblical
interpreters, although, because of the recentness of this
field, it has not officially entered the biblical studies
arena.
One final contribution which pragmatics makes is
in the area of context. Pragmatics desires to examine and
formalize utterances in terms of co-text (linguistic
environments of or in the text itself) and context
(non-linguistic situational features (speaker, audience,
spatio-temporal location, atmosphere, etc.).1 Contexts,
therefore, are not static, but are dynamic and meaning-
creative.2 Thus, Olson is correct when he complains
about
____________________
Non-language," in Pragmalinguistics: Theory and Practice,
p. 115.
1Marcelo Dascal, "Contextualism," in Possibilities
and Limitations of Pragmatics, p. 154; and Jorgen Chr. Bang
and Jorgen Door, "Language, Theory, and Conditions for
Production," in Pragmalinguistics: Theory and Practice,
pp. 46-47, where it is noted that context or situation may
be unique to the person while other aspects are more
socially determined and predictable. Thus the speech
situation is composed of all socio-psychological factors
which determine and help to interpret the speech utterance
(cf. Teun A. Van Dijk, "Pragmatics and Poetics," in
Pragmatics of Language and Literature, p. 29).
2Mey, "Introduction," in Pragmalinguistics:
the very vague, unspecified statements concerning context
in language studies, which pay lip service to the
importance of context, but which, in fact, have not
explicated specifically how that importance makes itself
felt in actual utterances.1
The initial chapters of this study were an attempt
to weave an historical, situational and ideational
tapestry for wisdom against which individual proverbs and
collections of proverbs may be understood. Although this
is merely the inchoation of such a study, which needs to
be made proverb specific, at least some broad
sociological, psychological, and notional parameters have
been broached as a background to a scrutiny of one very
restricted aspect of the text itself--syntactic
parallelism.
It must be observed that the schools of Prague2
____________________
Theory and Practice, p. 12.
1Svend Erik Olsen, "Psychopathology, Interaction,
and Pragmatic Linguistics," in Pragmalinguistics: Theory
and Practice, p. 247.
2The Prague school can easily be accessed in works
such as Josef Vachek's book, The Linguistic School of
Prague (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966); and
a work which he compiled, A Prague School Reader in
Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966);
as well as the works of Roman Jakobson which are heavily
used in the poetics aspect of this study. On the more
literary output of this group, vid. Paul L. Garvin, ed., A
Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and
Style, (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press,
1964).
and Copenhagen1 have not been treated, other than to say
that the Prague group has made its impact on this study
through the theoretical poetics of Jakobson, whose
sensitivities are reflected by O'Connor. The algebraic
calculus of Copenhagen's Hjelmslev is indirectly reflected
in Pike's tagmemic syntactic calculus.2
The Role of Case Grammar
Before describing the tagmemic model which will be
employed in this study, it is important to examine one
other linguistic approach which has been beneficial--case
grammar. A form of case grammar will be embedded into the
role box in the tagmemic model, so, in fact, to study case
is to study part of the tagmemic model.
Case grammar was initially proposed in an article
by Charles Fillmore (1968).3 While Fillmore concentrated
more on nominal case relationships, Chafe (1970)
independently began with the verb, then specified
____________________
1L. Hjelmslev and H. J. Uldall, "Outline of
Glossematics: A Study in the Methodology of the Humanities
with Special Reference to Linguistics," Travaux du cercle
linguistique de Copenhague 10 (1957).
2For a helpful chart mapping out the relations
between some of these groups, vid. Vern S. Poythress,
"Structuralism and Biblical Studies," JETS 21.3 (1978):
228.
3Charles J. Fillmore, "The Case for Case," in
Universals in Linguistic Theory, ed. Emmon Bach and Robert
Harms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1968),
pp. 1-88.
relations to that central verb.1 Fillmore, as a
contribution to TG, described relationships between
semantic-oriented deep structures and the grammatical
realizations on the syntactic surface structure. This
fruitful approach has been pursued in separate monographs
and has found its way into most present transformational
generative systems.2 Case grammar provides one nexus
____________________
1Chafe, Meaning and the Structure of
Language pp. 95-104.
2Walter A. Cook, Case Grammar: Development of the
Matrix Model (1970-78) (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 1979) presents one of the most lucid
explications of this approach to date. John M. Anderson,
On Case Grammar: Prolegomena to a Theory of Grammatical
Relations (London: Croom Helm, 1977) and also his The
Grammar of Case: Towards a Localistic Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971). John Platt applied case
grammar to tagmemic analysis in Grammatical Form and
Grammatical Meaning: A Tagmemic View of Fillmore's Deep
Structure Case Concepts, North-Holland Linguistic Series,
vol. 5, ed. S. C. Dik and J. G. Kooij (Amsterdam:
North-Holland Publishing Co., 1971). Cf. also Longacre, An
Anatomy of Speech Notions, pp. 38-97; and Pike and Pike,
Grammatical Analysis, pp. 40-53 (It should be noted that
Pike prefers to designate this as "role" rather than
"case," since he sees these types of relations on all
levels rather than strictly on the sentence level as TG
does [p. xx]). Cook is right when he observes that case
grammar provides tagmemics with a means of monitoring and
separating deep and surface structures (Cook, Case Grammar,
p. 33). For an application of case grammar to TG, vid.
Liles, An Introduction to Linguistics, pp. 146-70. More
recent, with a European flavor, is a work edited by Werner
Abraham, Valence, Semantic Case, and Grammatical Relations,
Studies in Language Companion Series, vol. 1 (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins B.V., 1978). Werner Abraham, "Valence and
Case: Remarks on Their Contribution to the Identification
of Grammatical Relations," in Valence, Semantic Case, and
Grammatical Relations, p. 695, mentions that Fillmore has
now given up this approach as a consequence of a work by P.
Finke, Theoretische Probleme der Kasusgrammtik (Kronberg:
Scriptor, 1974).
between semantics and syntax. But the connection is very
diversified so one should not expect a one-to-one mapping;
rather, case grammar reveals, in elements of syntactic
sameness, semantic diversity.
Instead of examining functions, such as subject
and object, semantic roles provide a better means of
specifying deep structure. Nida has noted that these
roles are of three basic types: (1) participants (agents,
recipients, et al.); (2) qualifications (ways in which
events, entities and abstracts are qualified and
quantified); and (3) relationships (the way in which
constituents are related to entities of space, time, and
logical order).1 Traditionally, the subject has been
described as the one who performs the action, which is a
bit strained in the following sentence: "The pungent
proverb was queerly quoted in Annette's anagram."2 The
following illustrations demonstrate the semantic
incongruity of syntactically equivalent units and, by
example, elucidate the types of deep relationships which
case grammar treats.3 Examine the diverse relations of
____________________
1Nida, Exploring Semantic Structures, p.
16.
2Liles, An Introduction to Linguistics, p.
140.
3For statements on the lack of congruence between
syntactic and case functions, vid. Palmer, Semantics, p.
147; Abraham, "Valence and Case: Remarks on Their
Contribution to the Identification of Grammatical
Relations," pp. 710, 714.
the subject to the rest of the sentence in these examples:
Dick received a headache from reading the paper.
(Dick = Subject = Experiencer)
Weston received a halibut from the incoming net.
(Weston = Subject = Goal)
Don went to a Cubs game.
(Don = Subject = actor)
Chicago is cold, wet and windy.
(Chicago = Subject = item)
The computer destroyed the data.
(Computer = subject = agent/instrument)
The March snows are melting.
(Snows = subject = patient)1
Also note the differences in how the prepositional phrase
functions in the following sentences:2
I ate salmon with my spoon. (instrument)
I ate salmon with my pie. (accompaniment/patient)
I ate salmon with my wife. (accompaniment/agent)
I ate salmon with a stomach ache. (accompaniment/
manner or circumstance)
The explicit relations between a grammatical category
(subject, object, prepositional phrase, etc.) and semantic
categories should not be strange to biblical scholars, as
many of the intermediate grammars contain such
associations.3 Some linguists have attempted to
____________________
1For similar examples, vid. Brown and Miller,
Syntax, p. 338; Cook, Case Grammar, p. 140; or Barnwell,
Introduction to Semantics and Translation, pp. 167-76
(which provides a series of explanations and easy problems
in a pedagogical manner which may be used to teach this
method to beginning students via scriptural examples).
2Barnwell, Introduction to Semantics and
Translation, p. 173.
3Ronald J. Williams, Hebrew Syntax: An Outline
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967); or H. E.
Dana and J. R. Mantey, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New
Testament (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1927).
determine, through frequency, what are to be considered
normal syntactic, case mappings. Cook, for example, has
observed the following hierarchy the subject slot prefers
first an agent, second an instrument, and third an
object.1 One of the significant features of case grammar
is its ability to describe semantic relations which are
language universals. This makes translation and
bi-lingual work more definable in terms of common deep
categories, even though the surface grammatical forms may
be very diverse. Pike suggests that language is a
composite of relations of form and meaning and that both
of these should be monitored simultaneously.2
Numerous lists of case roles have been suggested.
An interesting comparison of these is presented by
Longacre.3 The following is a list of roles defined and
____________________
1Cook, Case Grammar, p. 6.
2Kenneth Pike, "On Describing Languages," in The
Scope of American Linguistics, ed. Robert Austerlitz
(Lisse: The Peter De Ridder Press, 1975), pp. 21, 24.
3Longacre gives extended definitions and examples
of the following cases: experiencer, patient, agent,
range, measure, instrument, locative, source, goal, path,
time, manner, cause (An Anatomy of Speech Notions, pp.
22-37). He also provides a chart which compares the
results of Fillmore, Platt, Chafe, Cook, and himself (p.
25). Cf. Chafe, Meaning and the Structure of Language,
pp. 144-66; Cook, Case Grammar, p. 18; Barnwell,
Introduction to Semantics and Translation, p. 168; and
Liles, An Introduction to Linguistics, pp. 147-61. Beekman
provides a helpful chart giving definitions and examples
(John Beekman et al., The Semantic Structure of Written
Communication, p. 56).
exampled which will be employed in this study.
Agent: the instigator (if animate) or doer (animate
or inanimate) of an act
She introduced the speaker. [Actor]
The water ran down the wadi.
Experiencer: animate being which undergoes or is
affected by the event
He was cold.
John hit Bill.
Patient: that which is affected by the event
(inanimate)
The antifreeze froze.1
Causer: that which instigates the event
He made me happy.
Item: that which is named or talked about
The banana smelled rotten.
Instrument: the force or object used in the
carrying out of the action
She corrected the exam with a pencil.
Source: the origin
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