Thesis on coherence in James finished!

I took a break from posting here to finish my thesis before we head back to our translation work overseas.

I successfully defended the thesis on Tuesday at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, and now we’ve got less than a week before we start heading back to continue our work in language development in Papua New Guinea.

Anyway, I’ve added the following thesis title to the Recent James Scholarship page and to the James Bibliography page…

“Mitigation and Intensification of Persuasive Discourse in a Koine Greek Letter: Coherent Macrostructure in the Letter of James.”

Here’s the abstract…

Supervising Professor: Shin Ja J. Hwang

A longstanding debate continues regarding coherent structure in the Koine Greek New Testament Letter of James. I argue that multiple linguistic perspectives confirm the central theme of trust in divine grace and mercy as foundational to Christian behavior. Applying Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive semantics theory to James, a faith-journey conceptual metaphor structures the life of faith according to the source-path-goal image schema with a born-of-grace conceptual metaphor reflecting the source. Using Longacre and Hwang’s discourse theory, I describe James in terms of discourse type, notional schemata, macrosegmentation, skewing, paragraph relations, verb/clause salience, and embedding. A prototype approach reveals James as a persuasive text with embedded hortatory and expository units. Movements of mitigation and intensification most clearly reveal the coherent structure within the text’s profile and peaks. The controlling theme is ultimately derived from the above investigations in terms of van Dijk’s theory of macrostructure.

This isn’t part of the abstract, but the macrostructure (author’s global semantic plan) that I suggest for James is this:

Trust God, for he desires both to give grace to live righteously and to judge sin with mercy for all who have true faith, which is shown in humble acts of love for God and others.

I also argue for the following discourse peaks in James…

4:1-6 – First expository peak

4:7-10 – First persuasive peak

5:1-6 – Second expository peak (persuasive through skewing)

5:7-12 – Second persuasive peak