Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2012, Side 15

The concentration on the text also involves a holistic approach. I have
to do justice to all the parts of the text and to the different relationships
between them. As a result we got many structural analyses of different kinds,
eventually involving rhetorical and narrative patterns. Text-linguistics made
way for rhetorical criticism and literary analyses. We got, and still have,
three main perspectives in biblical exegesis: the Bible as a religious normative
text, the Bible as a source for historical reconstructions and the Bible as a
literary document.
A text-oriented exegesis also resulted in a new interest in the problem
of different types of texts and the importance of the genre in order to
understand the text. The Bible as history has been the dominant perspec-
tive during the modern era. Now we got more and more narrative analyses
which remind in some way of pre-modern reading of the Bible.
The pragmatic dimension is very important
If we accept a semiotic theory of language and regard the language as a
system of signs, it is theoretically possible to describe three dimensions in
the language:
1. The syntactic dimension, that is the signs and their relations to each
other, an intra-textual, or text-internal dimension of language. We
fmd many syntactic rules in the grammars.
2. The semantic dimension, that is the signs and their relations to what
the signs stand for, a dimension of language related to the reality. The
lexica give us different meanings of words.
3. The pragmatic dimension, that is the signs and their relations to those
who use the signs, an extra-textual, or a text-external dimension of
the language.
The relations between the three dimensions have consequences for our
analyses of texts. There are good reasons for an inclusive relationship so that
the pragmatic dimension includes the semantic dimension and the semantic
dimension includes the syntactic dimension. They are all dependent on
each other but the pragmatic is the most decisive in its inlusion of others.
Therefore, the pragmatic dimension is very important. This is my fourth
point.
If we look on texts in such a way we realize that grammar and lexicon are
not enough for interpreting texts. We must take the document as a whole
in consideration, the parts in relation to the whole text, the function(s)
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