Inhaltsangabe
The purpose of this study is to determine the function of the particle a in the West-Saxon Gospels. In order to test the often-articulated view that a is a foregrounding marker, the syntactic categories of the primary topics in clauses containing a are investigated. If a passage is foregrounded, its primary topic must have high topicality. However, the primary topics of the sentence-initial a-clauses have low topicality. A search for other features of foregrounding in the data resulted in similar negative results. This leads the author to conclude that a is an indicator of multifunctional discontinuity, signaling a shift of topic, scene, listener, content, deviation of time-line, or a combination of any of these. The instances which do not fall in these categories are treated as signaling action/thematic discontinuity inherently syntacticized in the form of parataxis. This book will be of special interest to scholars working in the fields of discourse analysis and Old English syntax.
Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
The Author: The author was born in Seoul, Korea. She received her B.A. degree in 1971 from Ewha Women's University in her country, where her major field was Teaching English as a Second Language. While teaching in a high school, she was awarded a Colombo Plan Award and entered the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and received a Diploma in TESL. After returning to her country, she received an M.Ed. from Ewha Women's University in 1978. In the United States, she received another M.A. in 1986 from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in 1990. Her major work at Georgia was Germanic Linguistics under the direction of Jared S. Klein, and her minor field was Anglo-Saxon. At present she is teaching at Sung Kyun Kwan University in Seoul, Korea.
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