Narrative Appraisal as a Linguistic Approach to Evaluation in Text: The Case of Pronouns

Abstract

Unlike modern narrative, which often goes into great detail in order to develop characters and themes, the narrator in the Old Testament is reticent, and the narrative is typically terse. There are many ambiguous passages involving actions of dubious propriety, resulting in readers being uncertain how to assess characters and draw ideological conclusions from their actions. It is too easy for modern readers to filter interpretive decisions through their presuppositions and values. Appraisal theory, an area of systemic functional linguistics, acts not to eliminate but to constrain the subjectivity of the interpreter and increase the transparency of the process by looking for specific linguistic signals in the text that can be presented as evidence. These instantiations are drawn mainly from the interpersonal metafunction, but also involve the textual and ideational metafunctions. J.R. Martin and P.R.R. White developed a system network through which text is processed in order to identify evaluative language; however, their work is based primarily on contemporary English texts of a rhetorical nature, such as political speeches and reviews. This article presents a modified system network, the “Narrative Appraisal Method,” adapted for Hebrew narrative texts. It operates not only at the level of the clause but also at higher levels of discourse. It takes into consideration the characteristics of narrative and the point of view of the evaluator. The article provides specific examples of the results the methodology yields from the book of Judges, focusing on situations in which pronominal forms play a relevant role.