Psalm 22 Discourse
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Macrosyntax
(For more information, click "Macrosyntax Legend" below.)
Notes:
- Direct speech: only v. 9
Waws:
- v. 3c-d: in line pair with a-b
- v. 4a: topic shift from 1st person actions of v. 3
- v 7a: topic shift from 3rd person actions of ancestors in vv. 5-6
- v. 20a: topic shift from third person המה in v. 18b
- v. 25d: introducing thetic sentence in contrast with previous three lines
Vocatives:
- vv.2-3: prime addressee for urgent imperative
- v. 4: possibly indicating superiority of addressee (Revell 1996: 338)
- v. 20a: post-topical constituent
- v. 20b: prime addressee for urgent imperative
- v. 24a-b: identify addressee
- v. 24c: mirroring v. 24b
Word order:
- v. 5a: informative focus
- v. 6a: confirming focus
- v. 6b: structural inclusio with v. 5a (if not also confirming focus)
- v. 8a: topic shift
- v. 11b: PP מבטם אמי provides mirror image with v. 11a to close section
- v. 11b: constituent אלי (if not information focus) provides inclusio with section (from אלי אלי in v.2)
- v. 13b: mirroring 13a
- v. 15a: scalar focus
- v. 16c: scalar focus
- v. 17b: mirroring 17a
- v. 18b: topic shift
- v. 19b: mirroring 19a (topic shift seems unlikely)
- v. 20a: topic shift
- v. 20b: topic shift
- v. 21a-b: both מחרב and מיד־כלב information focus
- v. 22b: mirroring 22a and topic
- v. 23b: mirroring 23a
- v. 24c: mirroring 24b
- v. 25d: thetic, with fronted temporal orienter
- v. 26a: confirming focus
- v. 26b: topic shift
- v. 31a: thetic
Paragraph breaks:
- v. 4a: topic shift
- v. 7a: topic shift
- v. 12a: mood shift and double subordination (see Lunn 2006, 24-25)
- v. 20a: topic shift and imperative
Speech Act Analysis
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Affect Analysis
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- ↑ When the entire utterance is new/unexpected, it is a thetic sentence (often called "sentence focus"). See our Creator Guidelines for more information on topic and focus.
- ↑ Frame setters are any orientational constituent – typically, but not limited to, spatio-temporal adverbials – function to "limit the applicability of the main predication to a certain restricted domain" and "indicate the general type of information that can be given" in the clause nucleus (Krifka & Musan 2012: 31-32). In previous scholarship, they have been referred to as contextualizing constituents (see, e.g., Buth (1994), “Contextualizing Constituents as Topic, Non-Sequential Background and Dramatic Pause: Hebrew and Aramaic evidence,” in E. Engberg-Pedersen, L. Falster Jakobsen and L. Schack Rasmussen (eds.) Function and expression in Functional Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 215-231; Buth (2023), “Functional Grammar and the Pragmatics of Information Structure for Biblical Languages,” in W. A. Ross & E. Robar (eds.) Linguistic Theory and the Biblical Text. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 67-116), but this has been conflated with the function of topic. In brief: sentence topics, belonging to the clause nucleus, are the entity or event about which the clause provides a new predication; frame setters do not belong in the clause nucleus and rather provide a contextual orientation by which to understand the following clause.