Salience in Biblical Hebrew narrative

Type Thesis

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Summary

In Longacre's (1989, 1992) salience scheme for Biblical Hebrew, the 'storyline' (foreground) morphosyntactic form (waw + Imperfect) for narrative discourse is characterized as being the most 'dynamic' morphosyntactic construction. However, 'dynamicity' is not clearly defined. I employ a saliency hierarchy adapted from Chvany (1985), a multiple feature scale incorporating Hopper and Thompson's (1980) notion of transitivity. The Saliency Hierarchy is applied to Biblical Hebrew narrative clauses from Genesis 37, 39, and 40 in order to test Longacre's claims for the Biblical Hebrew 'storyline' form in relation to the Hebrew Perfect, Imperfect, and participle. The results show that verb forms assigned lower dynamism by Longacre frequently score as high or higher in salience than the 'storyline' form. This demonstrates that a number of factors, not morphosyntactic form alone, conspire to create salience as well as precipitate use of the various verbal forms. Using the features of the Saliency Hierarchy, I characterize waw + Imperfect, Perfect, Imperfect, and participle in Biblical Hebrew, and refine the notion of 'dynamicity' as employed by Longacre.