Textual Markers Research Articles

The Role of Iranian Students’ Gender in Using Email Writing Linguistic Features

This study investigated the role of gender in Iranian students’ email writing features as an electronic software to enhance mechanics of email writing. The focal question was whether gender could play any significant role in the quantity and quality of the students’ email writing since it has been made new demands on language that leads to interesting variations in written language use. The design of study was descriptive regarding the evaluation mode of research procedure. Thus, one hundred MA students (57% female, 43% male) with the age ranging from 22 to 26 participated in this study. Two researcher-made instruments were utilized to collect the data. The first one was a-five point Likert self-report questionnaire on the participants’ age, gender, and years of experience using email as well as the amount and type of weekly email use. The next research instrument was the checklist extracted from Mulac, Bardac, and Gibbons’ (2001) linguistic features including interpersonal, textual, and contextual markers. Data were analyzed through percentage and Chi-square (X2) statistics. Results revealed that there was a significant difference between Iranian males and females in the use of email linguistic and stylistic features (p<0.05). Males’ messages had more textual errors. Moreover, it was found that females tended to use more informal and conversation contextual and interpersonal features than males.

A Cross Cultural Analysis of Textual and Interpersonal Metadiscourse Markers: The Case of Economic Articles in English and Persian Newspapers

This study was an attempt to investigate the functional role of textual and interpersonal metadiscourse markers in English and Persian Economic news reports. To this end, 10 news articles, 5 in each language, were randomly selected from the Economic sections of the leading newspapers published in 2013-2014 in Iran and the United States. Based on Kopple’s (1985) taxonomy, the type and frequency of metadiscourse markers used in the texts were analyzed to find out their functions in the text. The findings revealed that the textual markers used by Persian authors were considerably more frequent than those employed by the American writers. Interestingly, unlike the Persian writers, the American authors enlisted a larger number of interpersonal markers, which made their angle of the subject treatment different. It is evident that the differential use of metadiscourse markers by nationally different authors could be attributed to culture-specific norms governing the development and organization of discourse.

Discourse Markers and Modal Expressions in Speakers with and without Asperger Syndrome: A Pragmatic-perceptive Approach

From a theoretical point of view, this paper offers a new framework for the analysis of discourse markers: a pragmatic-perceptive model that emphasizes the point of the communication process in which such particles become more relevant. Furthermore, this approach tries to give an account of the modal expressions (attenuators and intensifiers) that speakers use in oral speech. The quotients of absolute and relative frequency with regard to the use of textual, interactive and enunciative markers – focused on the message, the addressee and the addresser respectively – are compared in two samples of 20 subjects with typical development and other 20 with Asperger syndrome. The general results of this research suggest that these latter speakers display a suitable command of textual markers, whereas they overexploit the enunciative ones in conversation.

Metadiscourse in Indonesian EFL Learners’ Persuasive Texts: A Case Study at English Department, UNISBANK

Writing competence facilitates the students’ success in their study. In order to produce a coherent text, a writer needs to employ sufficient metadiscourse markers. This study attempted to investigate the use of metadiscourse markers in 7 Indonesian EFL learners’ Persuasive writings. The study is descriptive, applying a quantitative method to support a qualitative analysis. The research results reveal that the occurrences of textual marker types in EFL learners’ Persuasive texts are overall closely similar to those at considered as standard proficient writing (extract from BAWE corpus), while those of interpersonal marker types are different from the standard proficient writing . Since the occurrences of interpersonal marker types are different from those at BAWE corpus in terms of hedges, boosters, engagement markers, the teacher needs to give more practice in teaching the interpersonal metadiscourse markers. Metadiscourse analysis can be a strategy to make the students aware of the important role of metadiscourse markers.

Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique

The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets.

Generation 1.5 Writing Compared to L1 and L2 Writing in First-Year Composition

Recently, scholars have suggested that “second-language writers” are made up of two distinct groups: Generation 1.5 (long-term U.S.-resident language learners) and more traditional L2 students (e.g., international or recently arrived immigrants). To investigate that claim, this study compares the first-year composition writing of Generation 1.5 students to the writing of their classmates to determine whether textual markers distinguish demographically identified groups. Results indicate no significant textual differences between Generation 1.5 and L1 (English as a first language) students but do indicate significant differences between Generation 1.5 and L2 students, suggesting that Generation 1.5 writers (broadly defined) may not be second-language writers.

Cidade de Deus - Refrações contemporâneas do cinema brasileiro

Ao explorar as marcas (inter/intra) textuais do cinema contemporâneo, aqui são estudadas algumas questões sobre o processo híbrido/labiríntico da estrutura fílmica, diante de transversalidades sincréticas da tecnologia à estética. Assim, este texto apresenta uma leitura crítica sobre o filme Cidade de Deus (2002), de Fernando Meirelles e Katia Duran, adaptado do romance de Paulo Lins.

O artigo de opinião no ensino médio: onde estão os conectivos?

Este artigo apresenta os resultados de um estudo sobre conectivos (ou marcadores textuais) empregados para articular a argumentação no gênero artigo de opinião. Adotou-se como fundamentação teórica a perspectiva bakhtiniana, com apoio das reflexões sobre coesão elaboradas por Ingedore Koch e Maria Antónia Coutinho. A análise dos marcadores argumentativos usados em artigos de opinião de alunos do ensino médio, de um jornal diário e de uma revista para jovens, levou à percepção de que há grande incidência da justaposição, ou seja, coesão sem conectivos. Observou-se que a justaposição é uma estratégia argumentativa produzida discursivamente em artigos de opinião, ainda que propostas didáticas baseadas em gêneros enfatizem a importância do emprego dos marcadores em sua composição. Nesse sentido, os resultados podem vir a auxiliar outros educadores no ensino-aprendizagem do artigo de opinião para alunos de ensino médio, na medida em que a justaposição pode ser confundida com o desconhecimento do emprego de marcadores argumentativos pelos alunos. Os resultados indicam que o professor, ao trabalhar com a leitura e a produção de texto, possa considerar a coesão por justaposição entre as estratégias argumentativas, tendo em vista que ela incorporou-se ao estilo do gênero.

The acquisition of French as a second language

1. Articles 2. The acquisition of French as a second language: New developmental perspectives (by Bardel, Camilla) 3. Articles 4. Synthese retrospective et nouvelles perspectives developpementales: Les recherches acquisitionnelles en francais L2 a l'Universite de Stockholm (by Bartning, Inge) 5. Pragmatic use of temporal adverbs in L1 and L2 French: Functions and syntactic positions of textual markers in a spoken corpus (by Hancock, Victorine) 6. La dislocation dans le francais oral d'apprenants suedophones: Emploi et developpement (by Engel, Hugues) 7. Vocabulary aspects of advanced L2 French: Do lexical formulaic sequences and lexical richness develop at the same rate? (by Lundell, Fanny Forsberg) 8. Formulaic and proceduralised language in the initial and advanced stages of learning French (by Towell, Richard J.) 9. The acquisition of additive scope particles by Moroccan Arabic L1 learners of French (by Veronique, Georges Daniel) 10. Development of object clitics in child L2 French: A comparison of developmental sequences in different modes of acquisition (by Granfeldt, Jonas) 11. Subject index

Love Lyrics in Late Middle Korean

Love Lyrics in Late Middle Korean Peter H. Lee (bio) Gesang ist Dasein. —Die Sonette an Orpheus One of the most intriguing and challenging topics in Korean literary history is the love lyrics in Late Middle Korean. By “lyric” I mean a fictional representation of a personal utterance to be sung.1 We do not know when the texts and music were composed. The social settings of these anonymous feminine-voiced songs have almost disappeared. Because the predominant [End Page 201] written language among the learned until the mid-fifteenth century was literary Chinese, the prestige language, no song texts could be written down until Chosŏn officials wrote new texts as contrafactum2 (writing new texts for popular melodies) for well-known Koryŏ songs. Because of the sociolinguistic status of the vernacular, we have memorial (oral) but no written transmission. Moreover, we have no textual history to speak of until the compilation of the Akhak kwebŏm 樂學軌範 (Guide to the study of music, 1493) and two anonymous compilations—Siyong hyangak po 時用鄕樂譜 (Notations for Korean music in contemporary use; ca. early sixteenth century; made known only in 1954)3 and Akchang kasa 樂章歌詞,4 an anthology of song texts dating from Koryŏ and early Chosŏn. I consider them diplomatic copies of the songs. These texts must have invited innovation as part of the process of transmission (mouvance = fluidity).5 Thus Koryŏ songs owe their survival to the adoption of their accompanying music for court use in Chosŏn. It is unclear, however, how the texts, dubbed “vulgar and obscene” and expunged by Chosŏn censors as late as 1490,6 managed to survive. Are what we have the precensored or the censored versions? Perhaps these songs were so popular that no one needed to write them down to remember them. Repetition and recurrent refrains—mimetic in origin—of both verse and music made it easy for the unlearned to remember. Oral delivery was the mode of transmission in an orally based poetic tradition, and we can identify the speaker’s gender from verbal [End Page 202] features and textual markers: woman, the locus of unrequited love. Songs are inseparable from their performance. The music composed for performance, together with song lyrics, invites a communal identification of singer and audience.7 But the texts do not encode information about the speaker’s social status and economic class: was she a propertied woman like the Occitan trobairitz of medieval Europe?8 The singer re-creates emotions in a specific context and shares those emotions with the audience. Was the song performed before a mixed audience? Did they identify more with the speaker than with the speaker’s target, the beloved? It was not considered indecorous in the Koryŏ period for women to compose and perform songs of love and to take part in public entertainment—a challenge to male monopoly on desire and language. About the same period (eleventh to fourteenth centuries) in the West there flourished Mozarabic kharjas (“exit”; the oldest known secular lyrics in any Romance language, the earliest ca. 1000);9 songs by the troubadours and trobairitz (ca. 1100–1300) in Old Occitan (Langue d’Oc; Old Provençal)10 and by the trouvères of northern France (late twelfth to thirteenth centuries);11 Galician-Portuguese songs (fl. 1200–1350), cantigas d’amor and cantigas [End Page 203] d’amigo;12 Minnelieder (twelfth to early fourteenth centuries);13 Goliardic songs including the Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren);14 the Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia);15 and the Harley lyrics (compiled ca. 1314–1325),16 to mention a few. These Koryŏ songs have come to us from anonymous women who lived and sang from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. No contemporary comments survive; the living context for these songs seems lost. Has the twenty-first century reader the means to understand the texts—can we reconstitute the feminine speakers’ voices, the first and only voices from that period, the inventors of love lyrics in the vernacular? Background The following observations are offered in the hope of better situating our songs in time and space, that is, in their sociopolitical and cultural contexts.17 My aim is to re-create...

Emotional and cognitive processing of narratives and individual appraisal styles: recruitment of cognitive control networks vs. modulation of deactivations

Research in psychotherapy has shown that the frequency of use of specific classes of words (such as terms with emotional valence) in descriptions of scenes of affective relevance is a possible indicator of psychological affective functioning. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we investigated the neural correlates of these linguistic markers in narrative texts depicting core aspects of emotional experience in human interaction, and their modulation by individual differences in the propensity to use these markers. Emotional words activated both lateral and medial aspects of the prefrontal cortex, as in previous studies of instructed emotion regulation and in consistence with recruitment of effortful control processes. However, individual differences in the spontaneous use of emotional terms in characterizing the stimulus material were prevalently associated with modulation of the signal in the perigenual cortex, in the retrosplenial cortex and precuneus, and the anterior insula/ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Modulation of signal by the presence of these textual markers or individual differences mostly involved areas deactivated by the main task, thus further differentiating neural correlates of these appraisal styles from those associated with effortful control. These findings are discussed in the context of reports in the literature of modulations of deactivations, which suggest their importance in orienting attention and generation of response in the presence of emotional information. These findings suggest that deactivations may play a functional role in emotional appraisal and may contribute to characterizing different appraisal styles.

Reflexiones en torno a la narrativa gay mexicana

The author recounts the textual markers of gay culture and writing in contemporary Mexican literature. He shows that the gay culture has survived years of repression by the heterosexual hegemony and it is now time to begin writing the history of sexual diversity present in Mexican literature for more than a hundred years.

Whitman’s War and the Status of Literature

Whitman’s War and the Status of Literature Edward Lybeer (bio) While the Critical Landscape Still Bears the powerful imprint of the linguistic turn, and its focus on epistemological issues, the opening lines of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sound refreshingly obsolete: “I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (188).1 In a leap of undisguised arrogance, Whitman’s poetics affirms the communicative transparency of language, the capacity to share one’s life in words, and to embody other people’s experiences within the text, beyond spatial, temporal, sexual or racial lines: “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man” (203).2 Extending his omnivorous polymorphism beyond the accepted contours of America’s system of legal and political representation, the poet even turns into “The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat” (225). And yet, the cosmic, all-encompassing bard of America’s letters can also be a poet of opaque uncertainty, untranslatable contradictions and invisible fugitivity: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / . . . / I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / . . . / You will hardly know who I am or what I mean” (246–47). Throughout Whitman’s corpus, the affirmative tone of his poetic litany is interspersed with not-so-rare moments of doubt and uncertainty. While “There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,” the lists of catalogues, enumerations, interjections and exclamations often cede the way to parenthetical spaces, suspended questions and other textual markers of hesitancy: “(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips)” (240, 230). [End Page 23] In his essay, “Phrenological Whitman,” Nathaniel Mackey captures the tonal discrepancy of Whitman’s poetics in the following terms: “one of the things I find most interesting in Whitman’s work is that tension, the unarrestable play between latent and manifest that brings an otherwise hopeful hermeneutic to grief ” (36).3 Whitman’s treatment of the Civil War also follows the movement of this fractured hermeneutic. As such, it offers a unique perspective into his multitudes, or what the poet himself calls “the duplicates of myself ” (235). Catastrophes have always been fruitful ground for creativity. This is not only the case of natural disasters, such as the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake—which famously inspired Voltaire’s “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne” (1756)—but also that of human-induced destruction. In spite of Theodor Adorno’s famous remark about the incompatible relation between the radical violence of World War II and the writing of poetry, human warfare has been and remains a central motive of literary production. Famous examples are, to name a few, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage Au Bout de la Nuit (1932), André Malraux’s L’Espoir (1938), Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) or the poetries of Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan. Of course, America’s Civil War occupies a central place in Whitman’s poetry. War poems are scattered throughout his work, and the Drum-Taps section of Leaves of Grass focuses on the poet’s response to what he once described as “a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity” (“Origins of Attempted Secession” 994). The most substantial portion of the author’s autobiography, Specimen Days (1882), is also dedicated to the recording of his experiences as a nurse in the improvised hospitals of America. Without exaggeration, it can be argued that the Civil War was the violent event that created Whitman’s poetic persona as we know it today. As Paul Zweig notes, “the Civil War brought a terrible renewal to Whitman” (18). With the publication of the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass (1871), the author emphasized the centrality of this moment by re-arranging the war cluster Drum-Taps and placing it at the center...

Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway

One important kind of literary criticism involved in the turn describes and theorizes the ethical relations that readers perceive among characters or between characters and the narrator.1 My interest in such value structures within a literary text, however, begins from an issue still rarely treated. I am concerned with experimental narratives with third-person narrators who deliberately make it difficult for readers to discern what evaluative stance they are supposed to have toward characters, events, or descriptions.2 In Virginia Woolf s middle-period fiction, the narrator's tonal cues within the text are frequently contradictory, inconclusive, or simply absent. By tonal cues I mean textual markers that prompt readers to have one affective response rather than another a response like sympathy, condescension, irritation, suspicion, approval and to make conscious or unconscious evaluations accordingly: a character is good, pompous, or inferior; a passage of dialogue or indirect discourse is misleading, pretentious, or to the point. In the fiction that interests me here, third-person narrators give conflicting or insufficient guidance about whether a character is admirable or trustworthy or about whether a passage in the narrative voice or an utterance by a character should be regarded seriously or ironically. In Peter Rabinowitz's terms, readers lack the wherewithal to make snap moral judgments, a loss that makes moral judgment puzzling and thus important to the process of reading (Rabinowitz 84-93). Mrs. Dalloway, one of the most beloved of Woolf 's novels, is also one of the most experimental in terms of the values its third-person narrator complicates or withholds. Its affective indeterminacy leaves elements of the story open to different responses, and these responses cue conscious or unconscious judgments.3 For

Marc Augé’s Theoretical Fictions

Among social-scientific analyses of how individuals interact with the spreading topographies of the contemporary built environment, ethnologist Marc Auge's writings on present-day architectural and technological spaces and networks have been taken up enthusiastically in areas of the humanities well beyond his field of l'anthropologie du proche. He is associated especially with the term non-lieu, adopted to describe the spread of certain kinds of construction in peri- and interurban spaces and the forms of interaction they invite, although he has also increasingly applied the term to the image-based technologies of the mass media that replace firsthand experience of reality with pastiches or fictions. These spaces and technologies, designed to be passed through or consumed rather than appropriated, characterize the contemporary period Auge calls supermodernity (la surmodernite), an age, as the prefix implies, marked by excess: the individual is simultaneously exposed to a surfeit of locations and information (through advances in transport and telecommunications) and made the reference and focus of political and commercial discourses in place of the collectivity. (1) Auge's diagnosis of a contemporary spatial condition, a social malaise rooted in uncontrolled urbanization and technological advancement, is informed by his observations on home ground in the Paris area or in French holiday resorts like La Baule, Center Parcs, or Disneyland Europe. It chimes with a certain vision, in contemporary French fiction, of the physical and social (and, to different degrees, emotional) landscapes of present-day urban and especially Parisian life (as represented, for example, in the works of Jean Echenoz, Michel Houellebecq, or Marie Darrieussecq). (2) But it is the place of within rather than alongside Auge's ceuvre that will be the focus of this essay. In common with the poetician Gerard Genette, I conceive fiction here not as a strictly delimited genre defined by particular formal or stylistic qualities (although some, such as point of view, may be closely associated with it; see note 5 below), but as a moment that occurs when narrative discourse concerns itself with objects, however intertwined these may be with real-world referents that themselves become derealized in this context: Est litterature de celle qui s'impose essentiellement par le caractere imaginaire de ses objets [...]. Le texte de [...] est donc intransitif a sa maniere [...] parce que les etres auxquels [ses enonces] s'appliquent n'ont pas d'existence en dehors d'eux et nous y renvoient dans circularite infinie (Fiction et diction 31, 37). (3) Fiction as the creation of has been widely considered by possible worlds theorists like Thomas Pavel: Fictions speak of that, without belonging to the real cosmos, use it as their foundation (Fictional Worlds 132). (4) Both Genette and Pavel are keen to emphasize that in realist texts, fictionality is not logically or semantically obvious, but, according to Genette, une probabilite culturelle, induite par un certain nombre de donnees conventionnelles d'ordres textuel, contextuel et paratextuel (57). Thus narrative oscillates easily between and nonfiction: hypotheses about the world are not forever confined within a given fictional genre. Since their circulation involves the entire cultural space, theory of cannot be isolated from the general economy of the imaginary (Pavel, Fictional Worlds 135). Hence the permeability of theoretical discourse to moments of fiction, of engagement with objects, as we shall see with Auge. The concept of the non-lieu itself has evolved over the years for Auge from its original empirical status to give greater place to what Genette acknowledges (after Kate Hamburger) as providing one of the most prominent (though not prerequisite) textual markers of realist fiction, namely point of view (76-77). …

Semi-automatic retrieval of definitional information: a northern Sotho case study

Corpus-based terminology is currently gaining ground on the international front. It is therefore important that terminologists working on the South African Bantu languages not only take note of this development, but that they should also follow this trend, even if they do not have the same measure of access to highly sophisticated software. The aim of this article is therefore to establish whether it is possible to retrieve definitional information on key concepts from untagged, running text by making use of affordable and easily accessible software such as WordSmith Tools. In order to answer this question, a case study is done in Northern Sotho, using textual material on linguistics as basis for a special field corpus. Syntactic and lexical patterns serving as textual markers of definitional information are identified and the success rate of the computational retrieval of definitional information is analysed and evaluated. Attention is also paid to the retrieval of specifically conceptual information, which turned out to be a fortunate by-product of semi-automatic retrieval of definitional information. Finally, it is illustrated how definitional information retrieved can be utilised in the writing of a formal terminological definition. Keywords: terminology, south african bantu languages, definitional information, semi-automatic information retrieval, terminological definitions, conceptual relationships, lexical patterns, syntactic patterns, textual markers, keyword-in-context (kwic), wordsmith tools

The (be)coming of peace: Time, women, and war in Andrée Chedid's La Maison sans racines

Synopsis Egypto-Lebanese author Andree Chedid's novel of the civil war in Beirut, La Maison sans racines [Return to Beirut] recounts in three narrative times a fictional background to the beginning of this war. Chedid incorporates references to the fable of the tortoise and the hare to emphasize the slow yet inevitable progression towards war. The relationship among women, time, memory, the arts of photography and film, and the start of war is examined in light of the insistence on time and space as malleable concepts. With its use of textual markers that underscore the theme of time and its relationship to space, Chedid's novel is best appreciated in the original 1985 edition since subsequent French editions and the English translation have modified those markers.

Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity: William E. Simon and the Rise of a Conservative Counterintelligentsia

As a conceptual term, “counterpublic” serves scholarship best when contributing to a critical-theory project, which means that particular constellations of materiality and ideology may bolster some calls for counterpublicity while gainsaying others. This may be investigated by examining how a text upholds or betrays an advocate's values, seeking out textual markers of access and influence that belie claims of marginalization, and assessing whether an advocate's discourse implicitly or explicitly widens or narrows discursive space for others. From this perspective, although William Simon claimed that pro-business advocates had been excluded from public debates in his 1978 book A Time for Truth, he nevertheless asserted a commitment to negative liberty that discounted potentially conflicting values in a pluralistic society, evidenced strong financial and political connections as well as a patrician background and bearing, and restricted discursive space for others.

Fingierte Mündlichkeit – inszenierte Interaktion. Die Novelle als Erzählmodell

Abstract The reflection of the genre of the “Novelle” (short novel) offers one way for a productive interpenetration of scientific literary and linguistic discussions about the phenomenon of textuality. It is the genre of the “Novelle” whose characterization has always been very dissatisfying according to traditional genre definitions within the scientific discourse. Typical formal and structural features are often too unspecific and mostly remain on the surface, if their function for the (con)text is not reflected adequately. Furthermore all the different catalogues of typical features mostly appear as static schemes that cannot do justice equally well to all the various manifestations of the “Novelle” as to the historical change of the genre itself. Due to these facts the article by Christine Lubkoll tries to define the genre of the “Novelle” and its specific textual manifestations with regard to its historically changing contextual conditions. The thesis of the article is that the narration of short novels itself reflects the social and cultural changes and the changes of media within the process of narration as a cultural practice. This becomes evident through textual markers as well as through dynamically developing textual features; both, the textual markers and the textual features of the genre have led to a strong genre-intertextuality; a dialogue of different texts and different époques. The first part of the article by Christine Lubkoll illustrates the history of the genre of the “Novelle” and its specific social and cultural relevance within different literary époques. It is then followed by the second part, an analysis of Goethes “Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten” and Musils “Die Amsel”.

Hosea (review)

Reviewed by: Hosea Mignon R. Jacobs Hosea, by Ehud Ben Zvi. The Forms of Old Testament Literature, volume 21A/1. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005. 321 pp. $55.00. In keeping with the form-critical model used in the Forms of the Old Testament Literature series (FOTL), Ben Zvi's volume includes discussion of the genre, setting, and intention of the book of Hosea and its individual units. The discussion is accompanied by a representation of the structure of the individual units along with extensive bibliography on each macro-unit. The clarity of the presentation seen in his volume on Micah (also in the FOTL series) is also reflected in his discussion of Hosea. Most valuable is his delineation of the intent of his task and the clarification of the method as applied to the book of Hosea. First, he clarifies that while he affirms the place of the book of Hosea in the Book of the Twelve, he also recognizes its independence as a distinct unit within that corpus. Second, Ben Zvi distinguishes between the formal and the conceptual structure of the book. Regarding formal structure, he identifies the macro-structure of Hosea as a typical prophetic book, namely: introduction (1:1), Prophetic Reading (body of the book) (1:2–14:9), and a conclusion (14:10). Ben Zvi identifies the conceptual structure of the book as a "very common metanarrative in postmonarchic Israel" (p. 8) and notes that while the book is not a narrative, the four stages of the metanarrative are reinforced in reading and rereading the book. Third, Ben Zvi's application of the form-critical method illustrates an adaptation within the method, namely, he focuses on the extant text rather than attempting to discern or reconstruct a form behind the text, and he embraces the tenets of literary criticism. Consequently, he emphasizes the reading and rereading of the text, further highlighting the role and identity of the actual reader on the reading process. In this perspective, Ben Zvi defines genre as a fluid product of the readers, readers' expectation, and the reading process that incorporates the textual markers and assign intention to the implied author of the text. According to this understanding of genre, Ben Zvi posits that the genre of the book of Hosea is "Prophetic Book" or "Authoritative, Ancient Israelite Prophetic Book," namely, one that communicated a claim for authoritativeness and was affirmed by a readership as such, and whose communicator is perceived as authoritative (p. 11). For Ben Zvi the reading and rereading of the Prophetic Book shapes and influences the readers' perspectives; therefore, he is adamant that the text is a theological rather than an historical document of the past. Accordingly, the images of the past preserved within the book are constructed by the authors in accordance with their perspectives and intent for their readers and are not necessarily consistent with social realities. Likewise, Ben Zvi proposes that [End Page 158] one of the primary intentions of the book is to socialize its readers in a way that idealizes them as the sole bearers of Yhwh's words and revelation. Ben Zvi's adaptation of the form-critical method is further evident in his understanding of setting. Regarding the intellectual setting, he proposes the literati and specifically the highly literate by and for whom the book was composed. More specifically, regarding the historical setting of the book, Ben Zvi proposes that its themes are crucial for discerning between the monarchic and postmonarchic times. Of these the exile, the unification of Israel and Judah, and the Davidic ruler are significant to the proposal that the readership of the book was situated in the postmonarchic period. Notably, for Ben Zvi this period is the most likely because it "provides the most reasonable historical background for such a text" (p. 14). Even so, Ben Zvi argues that while the readership of the book is situated in the postmonarchic period, the "world of the book" is the monarchic period. Accordingly, the readership lived out the events that the speakers/authors anticipated. The volume focuses on the formal structure or the individual units of the book of Hosea. The Superscription (1:1) orients the...