ADAB AL-BASRAH

In Melville’s Moby Dick and George Eliot’s Adam Bede, two sermons are delivered, which interrupt the narrative line and disrupt its conventional template. A minor character in the former, viz., Father Mapple, and a secondary character, a woman Quaker-preacher, viz., Dinah in the latter, do the speaking. The paper attempts to define and outline the characteristics specific to behavioural instances that happen to embed in narrative discourse in pursuit of a more universal taxonomy germane to behavioural discourse 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.