Re: D.A. Black's book

Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Sun, 16 Feb 1997 06:40:18 -0600

At 11:11 PM -0600 2/15/97, Eric Weiss wrote:
>
>Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek - second edition - ISBN
>0-8010-2016-6 $11.99 - Baker - 216pp.
>
>From the Preface to the Second Edition: "Although the basic purpose and
>content of the book have not changed, the present edition constitutes a
>step forward in two ways. In the first place, I have updated the
>bibliographies so that readers can appreciate the recent surge of
>interest in biblical linguistics. Secondly, I have added a chapter
>illustrating the place of discourse analysis (textlinguistics) in New
>Testament exegesis. The need to devote an entire chapter to discourse
>analysis became apparent to me in 1990 during a two-week conference of
>biblical scholars, linguists, and Bible translators at the International
>Linguistics Center in Dallas, Texas. That conference produced a volume
>of essays intended to introduce students to the relevance of discourse
>analysis for New Testament interpretation (see D. A. Black, ed.,
>Linguistics and New Testament Interpretation: Essays on Discourse
>Analysis [Nashville: Broadman, 1992]). My goal in the chapter on
>discourse analysis is to offer a focused discussion of the structure and
>theme of Philippians as a model of how some textlinguists go about their
>work. I have arranged the pericopes of the letter into a comprehensive
>outline that reveals the distinctive purpose of this often misunderstood
>letter. In a subsequent publication I hope to show in greater detail how
>the discourse structure of Philippians should shape our understanding of
>this New Testament book."

Thanks very much for this enlightening reference, Eric. It looks like a
"must read" for someone like me who have been involved in language-teaching
for decades but still don't know scratch about theoretical and applied
linguistics.

It would appear, moreover, that the work on Philippians described in that
introductory paragraph must be closely akin to the work of Jeffrey Reed
which Phil Graber pointed out to us at his (Reed's) web site:

http://www.wtp.net/go/reed/manuscripts.html

I won't cite in detail Phillip's message, but I just hunted it down in my
own archives and found it at the date January 31, 1997. It is worth
checking in the archives and re-reading or (for newcomers) reading for the
first time.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/