Abdal-Qahir Al-Jurjani, Roman Jakobson and Grammatical Meanings

This article is a review of the Rastakhiz-e-Kalemat (The Resurrection of the Word), a book by Mohammad Reza Shafiee Kadkani. It mostly examines the author's claim that Russian Formalists (specially Roman Jakobson) and Muslim rhetoricians (specially Al-Jurjani) have the same view of “Grammatical Meanings”. In order to show the inadequacy of this conjecture, concepts such as grammatical oppositions, markedness of one of the opposites, invariant meanings, and the role of context and situation in poetry has been examined drawing upon Jakobson’s work. Then, grammatical meanings according to Al-Jurjani have been examined. The article concludes that there is no similarity between these two view points and any claims of similarity is not justified.