Bouwman Wren. Morphological expression of imperative speech acts in the Gothic Bible

Iowa State University, 2022. — 37 p.The Gothic texts are used to study translation methods, language history, and Christian theology. From these three standpoints, the imperative meaning (such as commands, requests, or advice) in the Gothic Bible are of particular interest because the Gothic language features several grammatical forms that represent the imperative meaning. However, there is a gap in the current understanding of when, and why, one verb form with the imperative meaning is chosen over another in any given independent clause. Speech Act Theory has been used in other literary, theological, and historical research to evaluate the author's intent and understand the language of the time, but has not been previously used to create an exhaustive account of imperatives in Gothic. In this study, a schema of sub-categories was created for the imperative speech acts in the Gothic Bible, and all verbs with possible imperative meaning in the Gothic corpus were annotated with these sub-categories. Reliability was established between annotators throughout the process. The annotations were then analyzed through an incidence matrix to find tendencies for a specialized verb form and imperative speech act sub-category relationship. The results showed a strong tendency for immediate and divine commands to be represented by the imperative mood and a slight tendency for eternal commands to be represented by the optative mood. These findings could be important to historical linguistics, theology, and translation methods of early Christianity. Additionally, the annotation schema created for this study could provide a framework for further study within the Gothic Bible or in other religious texts.