New Testament Dialogues: Semantic Determinacy

The paper draws on the results obtained in the research carried out in the field of the theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP). In his recent writings, the author has presented the idea of higher levels of text (paragraphs or chapters) functioning as distributional macrofields of the degrees of communicative dynamism; it seems that such a macro-structural approach may reveal, among other things, essential syntactic-stylistic characteristics of a text. The aim of the paper is to explore the domain of written religious discourse (specifically biblical dialogues) in terms of semantic (in)determinacy, using tools offered above all by the arsenal of FSP. The preliminary FSP analysis will be followed by a discussion of the lexical and semantic means of expression typical of the discourse type under examination.