Pragmatic Trends in Arabice Linguistic Heritage
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Date
2009
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Journal of Arabic Linguistics Tradition
Abstract
Upon examining Arabic grammatical and linguistic works, it becomes apparent that some
Arab linguists had addressed what is known in Modern Linguistics as "pragmatics," especially in the
field of rhetoric. This study investigates and highlights the roots of pragmatics in Arabic Medieval
writings and attempts to uncover specific authors' contributions. Focus here is on the works of five
traditional authors: Al-Jāhidh, Al-‘Askari, Al-Jurjāni, Al-Sakkāki, and Hāzim Al-Qartājanni. From a
pragmatic perspective, some modern linguists such as Leech claim that in order to understand human
communication and expression, a number of factors inevitably need to be considered. These often
include one's own knowledge about social distance, social status between the speakers involved,
cultural knowledge such as politeness, and linguistic knowledge (explicit and implicit).
Although pragmatics is a relatively new branch of linguistics, a comparison between modern
theories of pragmatics and the early works of some Arab scholars shows that there is a clear
indication that Arab and modern linguists share some common theoretical and philosophical opinions
on the foundations and applications of lexical semantics and pragmatics. It is obvious that some Arab
scholars had addressed the importance of employing the linguistic context as well as the situational
context in the interpretation of a text or an expression if a deeper and generally more reasonable
account of human language behavior is sought. Arab authors had also addressed how the transmission
of meaning depends not only on the linguistic knowledge of the speaker and listener, but also on the
context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, and the inferred intent of the
speaker. Moreover, their views on communicative acts or speech acts are not limited to their linguistic
and rhetorical works; the importance of linguistic and non-linguistic components in interpreting
communications is widely discussed in their works dealing with juristic, exegetical, and other studies.