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The Use of Discourse Markers in Bible Translations

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Discourse Markers and Beyond

Part of the book series: Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse ((PSDS))

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Abstract

This chapter takes a discourse-pragmatic approach to the use of καί, δέ, γάρ and ἀλλά in the Textus Receptus of the New Testament, as well as to their translation equivalents (or to the motivation behind the lack of a translation equivalent), in a variety of Bible translations. The chapter concludes that discourse markers make an important contribution to the interpretation of various discourse segments in New Testament narratives as well as expository texts and that a primarily discourse-pragmatic, corpus-driven perspective on the functional spectrum of individual discourse markers is a more fruitful approach than either semantic-taxonomic or systemic-functional methods, traditionally adopted in the pertinent New Testament literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Discourse markers in general and New Testament conjunctions in particular.

  2. 2.

    Cf. e.g. “Valley Girl speech” in Blythe et al. (1990: 224).

  3. 3.

    Hence the sentence-initial “but” is introducing my statement. It might strike some as non-academic style; others might not even notice it in similar contexts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Linguistics, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest, Hungary

    Péter B. Furkó

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Correspondence to Péter B. Furkó .

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Furkó, P.B. (2020). The Use of Discourse Markers in Bible Translations. In: Discourse Markers and Beyond. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37763-2_9

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