A Taxonomy of Behavioural Discourse: A Linguistic Investigation into the Strategies of Preaching in Moby Dick and Adam Bede

In melville’s moby dick and george eliot’s adam bede, twosermons are delivered, which interrupt the narrative line anddisrupt its conventional template. a minor character in the former,viz., father mapple, and a secondary character, a woman quakerpreacher,viz., dinah in the latter, do the speaking. the paperattempts to define and outline the characteristics specific tobehavioural instances that happen to embed in narrative discoursein pursuit of a more universal taxonomy germane to behaviouraldiscourse in general. the sermons disturb the narrative flow as they formally deviate from the norms of narration since such features like mood/modality, clause structure, tense, etc, operate to set them apart. upon the analysis of the two behavioural instances, results come out in support of a behavioural template that can tentatively account for the behavioural discourse in english. behavioural/hortatory distinctive constructions are outlined and analyzed in search for a hortatory template and thematic interpretation