DE: Marked and Unmarked

clayton stirling bartholomew (c.s.bartholomew@worldnet.att.net)
Mon, 18 May 1998 14:03:00 +0000

Silva* in his discussion of discourse analysis talks about Paul's use of DE
both alone and in combination with other conjunctions in Galatians. He points
out in this discussion that the markedness or unmarkedness of a word or
construction cannot be determined by an uncritical use of it's statistical
distribution within a document or corpus.

This is a point worth pondering. DE may be the most common conjunction in the
book of Galatians but that alone does not make DE "unmarked". DE may appear in
a context where it's position within the semantic structure indicates an
adversative sense which is a "marked" usage of the word in Galatians.

I bring this up because I keep reading the statement that the "aorist" is the
unmarked tense. I think statements like this are misleading because they imply
that the form of the word alone determines it's marked/unmarked status. The
aorist can be used in contexts where it is "unexpected" by the experience
reader and in these contexts the aorist would be semantically marked.

-- 
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062


*Silva, Moises, Explorations in Exegetical Method: Galatians as a Test Case,
Baker, 1996.