Comparing construals of viewpoint across gospels: A Multiple–Parallel–Text approach
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The presentation addresses the radically conventional nature of grammar from a cognitive constructionist perspective and its influence on the rendition of religious scriptures. In this paper, I demonstrate how that characteristic of human language is revealed by the fundamental difference in construal mediated by the different sets of linguistic tools that are available to the speakers of different languages. In religious discourse, such characteristic of human language is evidenced in the religious scriptures in the various languages of the world, with the rendition of the gospel in different languages being a classic example. To illustrate this point, the presentation compares the narrative viewpoint structure in a selection of parallel biblical scriptures in typologically distant languages, using English and Chinese as samples. I select Luke 19:1-10 from the existing multiple versions from the two languages as illustration and compare my results with the viewpoint analysis of the same passage laid out in Yamazaki (2006). Methodologically, each of the samples represents a generalization made from the selected versions of Luke 19:1-10 in the two languages compared. Such method that involves multiple parallel texts from each of the languages compared ensures the representativeness of the viewpointing strategies that are found to be involved in encoding the biblical message and are, as a result, influential to the religious communities that speak that particular language. The validity of the generalization made for each of the languages ensures the methodological rigor of the cross-linguistic comparison. The main theme of this presentation is to demonstrate how the language-specific conventionality of human grammar creates the various irreducibly language-specific styles in which parallel religious messages (such as the Christian gospel) is communicated—although the various (teams of) translators manage to keep the main theme of gospel intact, the detail of how exactly the gospel is communicated do vary from one language to another. |