Linguistic Techniques (Grammatical and Phonetic) of Mutanabbi from the Point of View of Pragmatism

The pragmatism regards the literature as the most beautiful and effective kind of discourse. Indeed, literary pragmatism attempt to study literature in context using principles and strategies of linguistic pragmatism, because all of the usages of the language, meaning, and message occur in context before the lingual condition. This school technically possessed extraordinary ability in finding persuasive mechanisms and dimensions of language, eloquence and logic in all literary texts, especially poems. Suffice it to say that the pragmatism school familiarizes audience with a variety of communication functions and explanatory and expressive mechanisms. From this point of view, persuasive instruments of the announcer not only exalt the beauty of a literary discourse, but also it will have double effect on emotions and feelings on the audience; this reveals the persuasive aspects of poetry in the school of pragmatism. In this work we have attempted to analyze the persuasive-lingual usages from the perspectives of pragmatism in Mutanabbi’s poetry. Indeed, Mutanabbi has utilized grammatical and phonetic techniques to persuade his audience, which are discussed in the following: Repetition, a persuasive-communicative usage that leads to emphasize the word in the mind of the audience (Alaskari, 1952), is noticeable. Mutanabbi has used pronoun repetition to show his exalted spirit and has used derivative verbs to set musical rhythms to offer his ideas. In Arabic, elimination also plays a major role in the dynamic of the text and the engagement of the audience. The poet also has used this utility to donate beauty to his work and also to strengthen the ability of interpretation as a rhetoric mechanism (Fazl, 1992). Furthermore, Mutanabbi used some techniques such as Exception as an argumental and logical structure and Presentation and Delay as an approach for highlighting and conveying secondary meanings. Mutanabbi has used two phonetic techniques in his poetry. The first is parallelism, which is used as a lingual factor in musical order. In this technique, he has used meters such as Tavil, Kamil, Basit and Vafir as they are more effective in terms and expressions (Al-atibi, 2007). The second technique he has used is called Tasri through which the poet prepares the audience’s mind so that the audience can guess the rime of second line via hearing the first line. The current research aims to adopt the method of analytical pragmatism to review lingual persuasion techniques in the poems of Mutanabbi. To this send, first the authors pay attention to the concepts of persuasion and pragmatism and also the relationship between them. Then, they comparatively discuss the grammatical and phonetic techniques of persuasion in Mutanabbi’s poems. In this sense, this research is novel and new. Abu-Tayyeb Mutanabbi’s poems in the interaction or discourse field remain a wonderful mission in which the poet expresses his philosophical arguments and crucial evidences to emphasize fundamental purposes. With the knowledge of the effective lingual mechanisms and considering that Arabs have attention to verbal music, the poet has used syntactic and rhetorical means to persuade the audience. Such things promote lingual and philosophical aspects of pragmatism. For this reason, this poet is distinct from other poets of his era. Thus, today his wondrous techniques are significant and are considered as a comprehensive source of linguistic competence and persuasion. Based on the overview of previous discussions, we conclude that the persuasion process in poetic discourse of Mutanabbi is rather a language-based mechanism. Mutanabbi’s influence on his audiences is a good evidence that he has a great persuasive-communicative skills. In fact, this ability has high frequency in Mutanabbi’s poetry. He has aimed to communicate what is not mentioned by elimination. So the transmission of his messages with few words is the manifestation of his magical works. He has used the repetition and exception styles for further explaination, emphasis, and consolidation; however, the musical and harmonic context includes lingual structures which represent the discourse. Mutanabbi also makes understanding the meaning easier for the audience and provokes emotions using homogeneity in his words of poems and adds music in verses as such.
As a result, Mutanabbi has taken advantage of two important elements (i.e. phonetics and syntax) in the eyes of his audience. In this way, he has been able to inspire his audience and convinced them with important parts of his poetry without using any logical reasoning; this has made him superior in many ways to his peers.