Clause Linking Strategies in the Narrative and Instructional Discourse of Joseph's Speech in Gen. 45:3-15

Abstract

The article takes a longer piece of direct speech (Gen. 45: 3-15) as a starting point for a discussion of clause linking in relation to the concepts of 'main line' and 'discourse type' as well as the verbal grammatical morphemes making up the Biblical Hebrew verbal system. It is suggested that the concept of 'discourse type' must be redefined in order to be productive: 'a type of text characterized by a standardized coding of the main line'. In this sense direct speech is not a discourse type, since its main line can be coded by many types of clauses. 'Direct speech' is a pragmatic concept referring to the utterances of actants in the text. With Joseph's speech as point of departure the narrative storyline and the main line in instructional/procedural discourse are discussed. It is shown that the wa-VprefS clause is used not only to code a storyline in SBH but also to elaborate a preceding finite or non-finite clause. It is also suggested that when clauses are co-ordinated they as a rule show the same syntactical structure: NCl + NCl, Vsuff+ Vsuff, VprefS+ VprefS, etc. (Isaksson 2013). If there are no discourse type constraints (as there are in narrative prose and instructional discourse) co-ordinated clauses may be juxtaposed with or without the conjunction w partial derivative/wa.