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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