Transitivity-based foregrounding
in the Acts of the Apostles:
A functional grammatical approach

Rationale for Inclusion

This recently completed doctoral dissertation/book manuscript utilizes Halliday's functional grammar (especially as it concerns transitivity) to analyse foregrounding in Acts. The dissertation was written at Surrey University's Roehampton Institute London, under the supervision of Professor Stanley E. Porter.

Summary of the work

Here is what Martín has said about his work:

This thesis is an investigation of transitivity-based foregrounding in the Acts of the Apostles. Description is its final aim, yet, the descriptive work (chapters 3-5) is carried out after, on the basis of, and with regular reference to a detailed presentation of Halliday's functional grammar (chapters 1-2). In chapter one, I engage the ongoing discussion of New Testament rhetorical criticism in order to introduce functional grammar as a method of linguistic analysis which is fundamentally concerned with rhetoric and, therefore, ideally suited to address issues currently pursued with little success by the mainstream of rhetorical critics of the New Testament. In chapter two, I narrow the focus to the textual device of foregrounding, an issue of great interest to rhetoricians and functional grammarians alike. Following Halliday, I define foregrounding as linguistic prominence which is consistent and motivated and can be seen to cohere with the overall theme(s) of the text in which it is found. I argue that in Acts, the linguistic features upon which the author builds foregrounding belong, first and foremost, to the transitivity network of Greek, that is, the network that encodes processes, participants, and circumstances. I then present a detailed analysis of a transitivity-based foregrounding scheme in Acts 27 as a case study. Chapters 3-5 extend that case study to other key episodes in Acts, rendering a linguistically-based perspective on Luke's compositional and rhetorical agenda. I hope that this work will become a contribution to biblical Greek scholarship's full engagement with modern linguistic theory, an agenda being pursued by Nida, Louw, Porter, Reed and others.

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