The Structure of the Poetic Text: Structural Cohesion and Foregrounding as the Dual Rhetorical Discourse Function of Linguistic Parallelism in Biblical Hebrew Poetry

Abstract

The present project, by employing Roman Jakobson's conceptualisation of parallelism and literary linguistic analysis, argues that linguistic parallelism occurring at all levels of language (from phoneme to syntagmeme) in biblical Hebrew poetry has a dual rhetorical discourse function of foregrounding and structural cohesion. It is proposed that patterned grammatical-syntactic continuity and deviation at a colometric level creates poetic unity that harmonises the poem’s internal diversity and poetic variation across macrostructural levels that fosters foreground semantic components of the text. As the poetic text moves forward as a discourse, the diversity created by grammatical-syntactic deviation becomes patterned with a regular form of sequence that creates structural cohesion within the poem as discourse. After outlining the state of current research on biblical Hebrew poetry and exploring Jakobson’s poetics and their relevance to this project, the heart of the work is a detailed analysis of each poetic line in Psalms 113–118. These were chosen as a representative sample in order to test the validity of the model.