The role of cohesion and its beautiful effects According to Halidy and Hasan

Maqamah is a type of literary text that has enjoyed a broad and pervasive position in certain periods of Arabic literature; a number of notable writers such as Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadani, al-Hariri, etc. as well as Nasif al-Yaziji in the contemporary era have worked in this area. Since the majority of sciences deal with literature, various aspects of text linguistics have formed a vast portion of linguistic studies. Halliday’s functional approach is one of the prominent theories in this area in which novel dimensions of text linguistics are analyzed based on its role or function. Albeit, there is an ongoing debate among critics regarding the level of cohesion in “Maqamat”. In this study, it was attempted to examine text cohesion factors and their concordance in Maqamah Saviyah al-Hariri in light of Halliday and Hasan’s theory. It is worth mentioning the fact that there has been numerous studies in the area of cohesion and Maqamat, yet there has been no research focusing on “cohesion” and “aesthetics” in “Maqamat al-Hariri”

In their studies in 1976, the founders of text cohesion theory, Halliday and Hasan, examined texts and relations among sentences and named such connections as cohesion. According to the views of these two linguists, cohesion is a semantic concept which highlights semantic relations present in texts and specifies them either as textual or non-textual (Halliday, 1976). They indicated five factors including reference, substitution, ellipsis, lexical cohesion, and conjunction as tools creating cohesion in texts; in this paper, conjunction is investigated.

In this study, it is attempted to examine Maqamah Saviyah al-Hariri through the descriptive analytical method regarding conjunction, i.e. one of the factors for text cohesion, so as to provide answers to the following research questions according to statistics and analysis on the functions of conjunctive devices:Which one of these subcategories (additive, causal, adversative, and temporal) are more frequent in Maqamah al-Hariri?
What impact has the author’s mastery of employing language capabilities and forming a rhythmic prose had on the aesthetics of the text’s cohesion?

As one of the elements of text cohesion, conjunctions involve the presence of sematic relations between sentences in a text which, according to Halliday and Hasan, can be classified into four types including additive, causal, adversative, and temporal. Being the eleventh “maqamah”, the story of Maqamah Saviyah takes place in Saveh cemetery (of which the name “maqamah” is a derivative) and entails a number of moral points. In the story, the protagonist arrives at the corpse being buried and following a shocking speech often accompanied by Quranic verses and hadith as well as rhetorical devices, similes, allusions and metaphors, he reminds people of bitter truths which persuades them to contemplate; he then fills his sack of gifts from the people and leaves the place.
In the Arabic language, devices for these conjunctive elements include “واو، فاء، لذا، لان، لکن، ثم…” which play a clear role in Maqamah and even daily spoken language, to the extent that textual imagination appears to be impossible without such devices; this is due to the fact that the presence of a relation between sentences is necessary for the text to become cohesive. It is worth mentioning that the most used additive device is the conjunctive, “واو”, which plays its role within independent sentences throughout the text and contributes to the text’s cohesion. Other devices such as “فاء” involve broader functions, playing a significant role in various areas such as additive, causal and conditionals; on the other hand, in addition to bringing conjunction to the text, conjunctive devices result in grammatical balance and phonetic unity in sentences, inducing certain musicality to the text which has led to the formal aesthetics along with an increased semantic power in the text.

According to the important results of the study, additive and adversative devices involved the highest and lowest frequency of use in Maqamah Saviyah with 64.4 and 2.3%, respectively, which is due to the descriptive nature of the text. Causal and conditional relations with 12.3% and temporal relation with a frequency of 18.8% connect the events of the story, denoting death and separation, similar to a chain. In other words, the story begins with death and separation and ends with the separation between the narrator and the protagonist, the former leaving from the right side towards southern winds while the latter, Abu Zeyd Sarouji going left towards the northern wind. In addition to bringing semantic cohesion to the text, the use of conjunctions have also enhanced the aesthetic aspects of Maqamah.