Skip to main content
Open Book Publishers

4. Semantic Roles and Decomposition of Agency

Chapter of: Roles and Relations in Biblical Law: A Study of Participant Tracking, Semantic Roles, and Social Networks in Leviticus 17-26(pp. 131–154)

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
Title4. Semantic Roles and Decomposition of Agency
ContributorChristian Canu Højgaard(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0376.04
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0376/chapters/10.11647/obp.0376.04
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightChristian Canu Højgaard
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-05-30
Long abstractSocial network analysis relies on a mapping of relationships or interactions among persons or groups. Often a particular relationship is assumed (e.g., marriage or trade ties), but all sorts of relationships can be taken into account. One way to deal with social network analysis of texts is to extract all event structures consisting of an actor, undergoer, and event, grammatically realized as subject, (in)direct object, and verbal predicate. Leviticus 17–26 contains 181 different verbs resulting in a complex social network. This prompts the question of how to differentiate between various verbal events in a quantifiable way. The question is addressed by invoking linguistic theories of agency since all events presuppose a certain amount of effort on behalf of the agents. By implication, verbs can be measured according to agency required, that is, amount of force and volition. This chapter develops a framework for capturing agency from verbal events on the basis of the Role and Reference Grammar theory for deriving semantic roles from the lexical aspect of verbs, also known as Aktionsart. It is argued that dynamicity and causation are the two most important verbal features for decoding agency.
Page rangepp. 131–154
Print length24 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Christian Canu Højgaard

(author)
Assistant professor of Old Testament at Fjellhaug Internasjonale Høgskole
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1855-1017

Christian Canu Højgaard (PhD, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2021, awarded cum laude) is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Fjellhaug International University College Copenhagen. His main interests include Biblical Hebrew language (in particular verbal syntax and semantics), social readings of Biblical law, and digitalization of ancient texts. He is the general editor of Hiphil Novum, a journal for Biblical linguistics. He is currently involved in Creating Annotated Corpora of Classical Hebrew Text, a cross-institutional research project for the digitalization and annotation of ancient texts, and A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew led by Professor Geoffrey Khan.