Email this article 
Post a Comment Subject-tracking and Topic Continuity in the Church Slavonic Translation of the Story of Abraham and his Niece Mary
Abstract
The present article addresses issues of referentiality and text cohesion in a Church Slavonic narrative text. Starting with the specific problem of referential conflict as formulated by Kibrik [1987], issues of tracking personal participants in a narrative text are broadly explored in order to arrive at a rationale for the construction of cohesive text interpretation through topic continuity in subject position. The article takes an interpretative text-based approach of close-reading and argues for participant tracking to be dependent on text genre and general cultural prerequisites of text reading and interpretation rather than on systemic grammatical features of language. It is also hinted at the possibility that medieval narrative text genres (like the Byzantine-Slavic hagiographic genre being explored in this paper through the specimen of the Story of Abraham and Mary) may adhere to a type of narrative construction which places more responsibility on the reader-listener than on the narrator.
DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2019.8.2.2
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Ariel M., The function of accessibility in a theory of grammar, Journal of Pragmatics, 5 (16), 1991, 443–463.
Bielfeldt H. H., Altslawische Grammatik, Halle an der Saale, 1961.
Brock S. P., Harvey S. A., Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1987.
Chafe W. L., Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature, Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, D. Tannen, ed., Norwood NJ, 1982, 35–53.
Clark H. H., Using Language, Cambridge, 1996.
Dijk T. A. van, Kintsch W., Strategies of discourse comprehension, New York, 1983.
Dujčev I. S., ed., Bdinski Zbornik. Ghent Slavonic Ms 408, A.D. 1360. Facs. ed., London, 1972.
Fidjestøl B., Kenningsystemet: Forsøk på ein lingvistisk analyse, Maal og Minne, 1974, 5–50.
Georgakopoulou A., Narrative Performances. A study of Modern Greek storytelling, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, 1997.
Givón T., The grammar of referential coherence as mental processing instructions, Linguistics, 1 (30) 1992, 5–55.
Givón T., Topic Continuity in Discourse: An Introduction, Topic Continuity in Discourse. A quantitative cross-language study, T. Givón, ed., Amsterdam, Philadelphia, 1983, 1–41.
Gordon P. C., Grosz B. J., Gilliom L.A., Pronouns, names and the centering of attention in discourse, Cognitive Science 17, 3, 1993, 311–347.
Grimes J. E., The Thread of Discourse, The Hague–Paris, 1975.
Halliday M. A. K., Hasan R., Cohesion in English, London, 1976.
Harris R., The Language Myth, London, 1981.
Haspelmath M., Argument indexing: a conceptual framework for the syntactic status of bound person forms, Languages across Boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska. D. Bakker, M. Haspelmath, eds., Berlin, Boston, 2013, 197–226.
Hinds J., Paragraph structure and pronominalization, Papers in Linguistics, 10, 1977, 77–99.
Hinds J., Topic continuity in Japanese, Topic Continuity in Discourse. A quantitative cross-language study, T. Givón, ed., Amsterdam, Philadelphia, 1983, 43–93.
Kibrik A. A., Mechanisms of Referential Conflict Removal, Modelirovanie iazykovoi deiatel′nosti v intellektual′nykh sistemakh, A. E. Kibrik, A. S. Narinyani, eds., Moscow, 1987, 128–145.
Kibrik A. A., Reference in Discourse. Oxford, 2011.
Kotkov S. I., ed., Uspenskii sbornik 12th–13th c., Moscow, 1971.
Leskien A., Handbuch der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslavischen) Sprache, 9th ed. Heidelberg, 1969.
Levinsohn S. H., Participant reference in Inga narrative discourse, Anaphora in discourse, J. Hinds, ed., Edmonton, 1978, 69–135.
Li Ch. N., Thompson S. A., Third-person pronouns and zero-anaphora in Chinese discourse, Syntax and Semantics, 12: Discourse and Syntax, T. Givón, ed., New York, 1979, 311–335.
Longacre R. E., The paragraph as a grammatical unit, Syntax and Semantics, 12: Discourse and Syntax, T. Givón, ed., New York, 1979, 115–134.
Lunt H. G., Old Church Slavonic Grammar, 7th ed., Berlin, New York, 2001.
Marslen-Wilson W., Levy E., Tyler L. K., Producing interpretable discourse: the establishment and maintenance of reference, Speech, Place and Action. Studies in Deixis and Related Topics, R. J. Jarvella, W. Klein, eds., Chichester, New York, 1982, 339–378.
Mithun M., Overview of general characteristics, Handbook of North American Indians, 17: Languages, I. Goddard, ed., Washington D.C., 1996, 137–157.
Olson D. R., From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing, Harvard Educational Review, 47, 1977, 257–281.
Payne Th. E., Describing Morphosyntax, Cambridge, 1997.
Schank R., Abelson R., Scripts, goals, plans and understandings, Hillsdale NJ, 1977.
Scharpé J. L., Vyncke F., Bdinski zbornik. An Old-Slavonic Menologium of Women Saints (Ghent University Library Ms. 408, A.D. 1360), Bruges, 1973.
Skirl H., Metaphorical anaphors. A phenomenon of the semantics-pragmatics interface, Anaphors in Text. Cognitive, formal and applied approaches to anaphoric reference, M. Schwarz-Friesel, M. Consten, M. Knees, eds. Amsterdam, Philadelphia, 2007, 103–119.
Vaillant A., Manuel du vieux slave, 2nd ed., Paris, 1964.
Večerka R., Keller F., Weiher E., Altkirchenslavische (altbulgarische) Syntax, 2: Die innere Satzstruktur, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1993.
Zwaan R. A., The immersed experiencer: toward an embodied theory of language comprehension, The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 44, 2003, 35–62.
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2019 Dieter Stern
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.