This study attempts to analyse the text of Hebrews with a method of discourse analysis primarily based on a form of systemic functional linguistics developed for Hellenistic Greek, but it is also informed by other linguistic studies. It begins with a general survey of the literature that is either influential or representative of approaches to the structure of Hebrews. The survey is followed by an introduction to the terminology and definitions of discourse analysis, as well as the theory behind the methodology, and describes a procedure for analysing text. Hebrews is treated as having three sections. The first section of Hebrews (1:1-4:16) demonstrates the organization of the units, the topic of the units, the prominent text, and the relationship of the first section with the rest of the discourse. The second section of Hebrews (4:11-10:25) is described in two parts (4:11-7:28 and 8:1-10:25) because of its length. There is an overlap between the first and second sections in 4:11-16 and between the second and third sections in 10:19-25. Both of these passages have a concluding function for the preceding co-text and a staging function for the following co-text, so that they look backwards and forwards. The third and final section in 10:19-13:25 contains the climax or discourse peak. The study is concluded with a description of the coherence of the discourse and a presentation of a mental representation of the text. JSNTS and Studies in New Testament Greek subseries

The book is the first to apply David Brazil s Discourse Intonation systems (prominence, tone, key and termination) to the study of a corpus of authentic, naturally-occurring spoken discourses. The Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (prosodic) is made up of approximately one million words consisting of four sub-corpora of equal size, namely academic, conversation, business and public. The participants are all adults and typically have either Cantonese or English as their first language. The four Discourse Intonation systems are described in terms of how the system works and how they are manifested in the corpus, both across the sub-corpora and also across speakers in the corpus. The book is accompanied with a CD containing the prosodically transcribed corpus together with iConc which is the software designed and written specifically to interrogate the HKCSE (prosodic). The issues raised and discussed are all of importance in Conversation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Discourse Intonation, Pragmatics, and Intercultural Communication.