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Have We Come Full Circle Yet? Closure, Psycholinguistics, and Problems of Recognition with the Inclusio

Salt Lake City, Utah 84121, USA chriswyckoff{at}earthlink.net

Literature communicates its own structure to an audience with linguistic devices that discourse analysts call boundary markers. Boundary markers are linguistic cues that signal the structural borders within a discourse and at its outer limits. The literary question of closure, that is, how a poem ends, is directly dependent upon such linguistic signals. The inclusion, a structural convention whereby the opening of a poem is repeated at the end as in Psalm 8, is an obvious example of a boundary marker. Biblical scholars enjoy identifying inclusios but many so-called examples are less than obvious. These are problematic and beg the question: What makes an inclusion recognizable? Discourse-analytic studies of language, memory, and recognition provide an important and effective answer.

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