Coherence and Prominence in the Sermon on the Mount : A Systemic-Functional Approach

Författare

Jan Nylund

Summary, in English

Language is a social phenomenon used for communication and to convey messages from one individual to another. The systemic-functional approach embraces the linguistic expression of the Sermon, the co-text, as well as its paralinguistic reference points, the context. The Sermon on the Mount is probably the most well-known passage of text in the New Testament and is a structured discourse with far-reaching social implications. The interdisciplinary potential of the systemic-functional approach appeals to various cross-disciplines, such as psychology, linguistics, literary theory and sociology. In this paper, though, I will restrict myself to how co-textual, linguistic elements relate to the social realities of the text.

My analysis seeks to demonstrate how the various levels of text — ranging from the word and phrase levels to the levels of the sentence, the paragraph and the entire discourse — interplay to create coherence as well as marking features of prominence, or, to put it differently, to answer questions such as: How do the various parts of the Sermon relate to each other? What is it that makes them hang together? Are there features of the text that are more emphasized than others and, in that case, how do we know that?

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