The Role of Context and Speaker in Jurjani's Theory of Meaning

This paper presents Abdu’l-Qaher Al-Jurjani’s conception of meaning together with the role of context and speaker in this regard. He appears to have a functional approach to meaning and awareness of the notion of ‘text’. The distinction he makes between what could roughly be called meaning and implicature is to some extent like Grice’s dichotomy of sentence and speaker meaning.His theory of Nazm(Construction), his insightful consideration of context and his dichotomies of form/meaning and figurative/literal are also presented. Jurjani’s theories show considerable similarities to present day linguistic trends.