The Relationship Between Language and the Bible: Discourse Approach

Abstract

Language is a means of communication between people. Human beings interact by talking to one another through language and this is equally portrayed in the Holy Bible where it is recorded that the use of Language came about through God himself in the beginning; both in the written and spoken form of Language use. This means of communication is known as the discourse in which its nature of coherent structure has to be studied; Genesis chapter 4 verses 6- 16 have been purposefully selected because it contains the concept of discourse in language based on discourse rankscale. This study focused more on the use of “discourse rankscale” in analyzing selected conversations from the Bible. Coulthard (1975) proposed a five-unit rankscale for discourse to be: Lesson, Transaction, Exchange, Move and Act. Hence, the study finds fourteen (14) Acts present whereby the acts are performing different functions. The identified act provided information, response, and request for information. There are six (6) moves in the discourse which are subdivided into three (3) simple moves and (3) complex moves. Thus, using the familiar hierarchical grammatical structure in conveniently describing what happens in discourse analysis; it has been observed that conversation or discourse in the Bible has rank-scale manifestation in looking at the elements that the discourses constitute.