Rhetorical Structure Theory and the Study of Biblical Hebrew Discourse Markers

In the present paper I will investigate the applicability of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to the study of Biblical Hebrew discourse markers. The basic notions and tools of this theory will be tested as appropriate for the analysis of inferential and causative markers in Biblical Hebrew. RST was at first formulated in 1988 by W.C.Mann and S.A.Thompson. At the moment RST is one of the dominating and authoritative theories of discourse organization. It has proven to be a useful tool in analyzing discourse structure of the texts in many languages. Fairly recently RST was applied to the study of discourse markers (DM) in general and discourse particles in particular. There are different approaches to discourse markers and different understandings of what they are. I follow the approach to discourse markers represented in the works of L.Schourup and B.Fraser. That type of DM which could be called connective type is especially susceptible to analysis with the methods of RST because RST is focused on text coherence and the discourse relations within utterances. The important caveat: for the time being RST is applicable mostly for the analysis of monologic speech; its usefulness for the analysis of dialoge relations (relations between turns) is not obvious so far. For that reason I restrict the linguistic material only to the DM which mark the relations within turns or utterances, not between them. F.e. the particle "bl , discussed recently as a discourse marker by R.Garr, would not be approptiate here in most of its uses. For the present purposes I have chosen two related functional sets of Biblical Hebrew DM: inferential, or logical, markers (lkn, w"th) and causative markers (ky, y"n). The following relations out of the RST set of relations will be discussed as relevant: enablement, justify, motivation, volitional/non-volitional cause, volitional/non-volitional result.