Endings in Short Biblical Narratives

Abstract ENDINGS IN SHORT BIBLICAL NARRATIVES Susan Zeelander Professor Jeffrey H. Tigay There has been much study of the narrative aspects of the Bible in recent years, but the ends of biblical narratives—how the ends contribute to closure for their stories, whether there are closural conventions that biblical writers regularly used, in what ways the ending strategies affect the whole narrative—have not been studied. Knowledge of closural conventions can address these questions and even whether biblical writers used them intuitively or intentionally. This dissertation is the first thorough study of the ends of biblical narratives; its prime data are the relatively short narratives in Genesis 1-35 and 38. The first step in the study is to determine what constitutes the end of a biblical narrative. I use a system within narratology based on paradigms developed by Emma Kafalenos that identifies the end as the resolution of the key destabilizing action or perception; that together with additional information that the writer adds forms an “end-section.” I use literary methods, a close reading of the text and awareness of the Bible’s textual and compositional history and the interconnectedness of its literary art and themes, to identify the closural devices within end-sections. This dissertation shows that all the Genesis narratives, irrespective of their documentary source, use one or more structural, thematic, and linguistic closural devices. Some of the devices can be found in non-biblical genres, some are significant only in Genesis. They include rituals, etiologies, frames and summaries, as well as specific motifs, language, and repetitions that mark the changes in their stories; they use entertainment, flattery, logic, education and didacticism. I suggest that there are aspects of our minds, culture, philosophies, and experience in life that draw the writer and the reader most often to closure, although some of the narratives leave important questions unresolved. I investigate possible reasons why this may be so. I conclude that the short narratives in Genesis are filled with closural conventions that mark the ends of their stories and help indicate that they are complete and over, even when a reader would like the story to continue. Future research can apply this methodology and the results to larger units within the Bible and to extant narratives in the ancient Near East

A semantically-oriented grammar of the Yankunytjatjara dialect of the Western Desert language

The Western Desert Language is a fairly typical Pama- Nyungan language, spoken in the arid western interior of Australia; it is suffixing and agglutinative, with a well-developed case system and a fairly free but basically verb-final word-order. Chapter 1 outlines my fieldwork methodology and semantic approach, and the physical and socio-cultural setting of the Yankunytjatjara dialect. Chapter 2 briefly describes its segmental phonology and some preliminary matters such as parts of speech. The bulk of the thesis describes the morphosyntax in a fairly informal typologically-oriented fashion, with an emphasis on semantics. The treatment of case in Chapter 3 is based on the traditional distinction between a category and its marking, and on the traditional concept of a case as a substitution class. This leads me to recognise three core case categories — an A case (ergative), an 0 case (accusative) and an S case (nominative), despite the fact that they are realised differently with nouns (nominative=accusative) and pronouns (nominative=ergative). This interpretation allows an elegant statement of the structure of certain NP types, such as those involving inalienable possession and group inclusion, and of a pervasive case agreement rule whereby manner-like nominals (active adjectives) agree in case with the actor/subject NP. Non-pronominal case-markers are shown to be portmanteau morphemes, signalling name-status as well as case. Purposive and locative cases are each treated in some detail, showing the semantic interrelatedness of their uses (including the genitive use of purposive case, and the instrumental use of locative case). The 'local' cases (allative, ablative and perlative) are treated more briefly. Chapter 4 deals with NP structure, demonstratives, free and clitic pronouns, nominal derivation and an interesting class of suffixes (relators) showing intention, deprivation, sequential action and control (’having1), which display the actor agreement pattern of case inflection. Chapter 5 begins with nominalisation and goes on to describe how subordination and relativisation are achieved by adding case or relator suffixes to nominalised clauses; also discussed is the ’switch-reference’ specification in the semantic structure of purposive and circumstantial (background) clauses. Chapter 6 deals with verbal inflection, highlighting a perfective/imperfective aspectual contrast in certain tense/mood categories. Adopting a system of intermediate (augmented) stems simplifies the formal description of the paradigms for the four conjugational classes. Chapter 6 also discusses several types of serial verb construction within the Foley/Van Valin typology of clause juncture. Verbal derivation and compounding are treated in Chapter 7; and miscellaneous topics such as negation, temporal and spatial expressions, interrogatives and adverbs in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 begins with sentence connectives (including a discussion of a switch-reference contrast) and proceeds with a fairly detailed survey of free and clitic particles. The final chapter briefly describes some speech registers, the auxiliary language anitji and other matters relating to language use. There is detailed exemplification throughout, and eleven accompanying texts in the Appendix