Arabic rhetoric: A pragmatic analysis (review)

James Dickins

Language, Volume 85, Number 4, December 2009, pp. 908-912 (Article)

Published by Linguistic Society of America DOI: 10.1353/lan.0.0158

For additional information about this article

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REVIEWS Arabic rhetoric: A pragmatic analysis. By HUSSEIN ABDUL-RAOF. London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 256. ISBN 9780415386098. $170 (Hb). Reviewed by JAMES DICKINS, University of Salford
The Arabic linguistic tradition makes a fundamental distinction between grammar, as a discipline dealing with the formal structures of Arabic, and rhetoric, dealing with the effective employment of these structures in communication. This book provides an outline of the major scholars and developments of Classical Arabic rhetoric and discusses the main practical analyses of Arabic developed by the Classical Arabic rhetoricians. The title Arabic rhetoric: A pragmatic analysis suggests that the book might have a somewhat different orientation than the one it hasproviding either an account of the rhetoric of Arabic (in practice) as understood using a modern pragmatic model, or an account of the principles and/or specific analyses of traditional Arabic rhetoric (as a discipline) understood through the prism of one or more modern approaches to pragmatics. As noted, the book does neither of these things. Some reference is made at various points to modern pragmatic theories, but this is rather cursory in nature. For example, Abdul-Raof states: Al-Jurja n s theory of word order is echoed by Relevance theory developed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986 which refers to the form of the speech act and its main explicature of the proposition. In other words, the different propositional forms of the speech act lead to different propositional attitudes and contextual implicatures (72). This line of enquiry is not, however, subsequently pursued. A does not, for example, attempt to demonstrate how modern pragmatic theories can illuminate traditional Arabic rhetorical ideas, or, conversely, how traditional Arabic rhetorical theory might go beyond modern pragmatic theories, providing insights that these latter lack. The overall orientation of the book is confirmed by the fact that out of a total of seventytwo references in the bibliography, forty-four are Arabic (including a large number of works by Classical Arabic rhetoricians), while twenty-eight are English-language works, the majority not specifically works on pragmatics. As an exposition of Classical Arabic rhetoric, this work is both competent and extensive. Ch. 2 provides a historical review of the major concerns, phases, and scholars of Classical Arabic rhetoric. It also includes sections on the relationship of Classical Arabic rhetoric to the notion of the i ja z inimitability of the Quran, and on modern Arab scholars working within the overall perspective of the Classical Arabic rhetorical tradition. Ch. 3 provides an account of the distinction between eloquence ( fas h gha ). Chs. 46 provide an account of the three .a . a ) and rhetoric ( bala branches of rhetoric as these came to be recognized in the mature phase of Classical Arabic rhetoric: ilm al-ma a n (translated rather misleadingly by A as word order; see below), ilm al-baya (embellishments). n (figures of speech), and ilm al-bad Ch. 4 considers the pragmatic differences between different word orders, and notions that can be allied to this, such as the use of emphatic particles ( inna, sometimes translated as verily, and the verb/verb-phrase intensifier qad ). A discusses the notion of naz . m (translated rather unilluminatingly as order system), as developed by Al-Jurja n . A looks at different types of utterances: propositional and nonpropositional (interrogatives, imperatives, etc.), considering basic and nonbasic (illocutionary or similar) uses of these. The use of the emphatic particles in relation to propositional utterances is considered. The latter part of Ch. 4 deals with the functions and manipulations of the two parts of the utterance as recognized by the Arab rhetoricians: the musnad ilaihi and the musnad. Traditional Arabic grammar recognizes two types of sentences/ clauses: (i) nominal sentences/clauses, and (ii) verbal sentences/clauses. A nominal sentence/ clause is a sentence/clause that in its basic word order does not begin with a verb. A nominal sentence/clause consists of two elements: (a) what is known as a mubtada (more properly almubtada bih that which is begun with), translated by A as inchoative and by some other writers (e.g. Watson 1993:96) as predicand; and (b) a xabar, translated by many writers, includ908

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ing A, as a predicate. Although a nominal sentence/clause cannot in its basic word order begin with a verb, its predicate may be a verb. Thus, zayd-un d . ah . ika Zayd laughed, in which the dak predicate is the verb d U Zayd is clever, . ah . ika laughed, is a nominal sentence, as is zayd-un d dak in which the predicate is an adjective d U clever. A verbal sentence/clause is a sentence/clause that in its basic word order begins with a verb. Verbal sentences/clauses do not need to have an explicit subject element, and thus may consist minimally of a verb only. An example is d . ah . ika he laughed. They may also have an explicit subject element (e.g. d . ah . ika zayd-un Zayd laughed). Traditional Arabic grammar terms the subject of a verbal sentence (at least where this sentence is active) the fa il doer, agent, typically translated as subject, and divides the rest of the sentence into the verb ( fi il ) and elements dependent on the verb. The term musnad ilaih in traditional Arabic rhetoric covers both the inchoative/predicand of a nominal sentence/clause and the subject of a verbal sentence. The term musnad in rhetoric covers both the predicate of a nominal sentence/clause and the verb (and by extension its dependents) in a verbal sentence/clause. The middle part of Ch. 4 deals with the various forms of musnad ilaihi and musnad (e.g. in terms of definiteness), the basic and nonbasic word orders of the musnad ilaihi and the musnad, and basic and nonbasic (pragmatic) meanings of the musnad ilaihi and the musnad. The final parts of Ch. 4 cover other features that fall under ilm al-ma a n , such as the uses of the three basic conjunctions in Arabic, wa- and, fa- so/and so, and tt U umma then, as well as the uses of asyndetic coordination. Ch. 5 considers figures of speech: tashb h (simile), maja z (which A translates as allegory), and kina , which the author translates as ya (metonymy). Ch. 6 looks at the domain of ilm al-bad embellishments, divided into two types: semantic embellishments and lexical embellishments. Semantic embellishments include such features as antithesis, apostrophe, chiasmus, epistrophe, epitrope, and euphemism. Lexical embellishments include such features as alliteration, assonance, and jina s various forms of formal similarity between phrases, words, or parts of words. The book also includes a glossary of around 450 Arabic rhetorical terms and their proposed English equivalents. There is thus a lot of useful and interesting information in this book, providing a detailed account of the main analyses of traditional Arabic rhetoric. There are, however, a number of restrictions and problems. A major, but absolutely reasonable, restriction is that the book can only be used by those who know Arabic. All examples, for instance, are given in Arabic script, and they are normally translated in a fairly idiomatic manner rather than as word-for-word glosses. This is not a problem, of course, if we assume the reader is an Arabic specialist. More problematic is the fact that the author provides scant references to his sources within his description of the different rhetorical features. One of the very valuable aspects of a book of this kind is that it brings together information from different sources, presenting the material in a way that is accessible to the reader (particularly if that reader is not a native speaker of Arabic, and is not well versed already in the traditional literature). It should also enable the reader, however, to go back to original sources, allowing him or her to check the different, and often varying, accounts of the Arab rhetoricians themselves. This book does not really enable the reader to do that. This shortcoming can be rectified through the addition of references to original Arabic rhetorical worksand I hope that it will be in future editions of the book. There are, however, other deeper problems. A writes of modern Western scholarship, There has been considerable interest in Arabic grammar, in particular, and numerous resources on Arabic linguistics and grammar are available to the English-speaking reader or researcher. . . . Sadly, no interest has been shown by scholars in other vital areas of [Arabic] linguistics such as semantics, pragmatics, stylistics or rhetoric (15). In fact, a number of significant works have been published in these latter areas, to which the author does not refer. The entries for i ja z, a ins ra maja z, and ma na in the Encyclopedia of Arabic language and linguistics (Versteegh , isti a et al. 20052009) list among other works written in English Abu Deeb 1979, Bohas et al. 1990, nescu 2003, Heinrichs 1977, Bonebakker 1973, Boullata 1988, Cachia 1998, Dichy 2003, Fira

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1994, 1998, Larkin 1995, Levin 1981, Pellat 1986, Talmon 1987, and Versteegh 1997. A fair number of other relevant works in English also exist, such as Al-Sharafi 2004, which contains a detailed account of the development of kina ya (sometimes translated as metonymy in the Arabic rhetorical tradition). Probably even more has been written in German than in English, as well as a significant amount in French, and some work in other Western languages. As disregarding of previous works in English on Arabic rhetoric and related topics has both general and specific negative effects. On a general level, A is not able to draw on the insights of other writers, particularly with regard to the overall conceptual organization of the notions with which he is dealing. Bohas and colleagues (1990) are especially good at identifying and explicating the fundamental conceptual principles underlying both Arabic grammar and Arabic rhetoric, and in explaining how these principles work themselves out in specific analyses in both grammar and rhetoric. In contrast, the current work seems somewhat compendious and unstructured. With regard to specific issues, As book would have benefited from the analyses of previous authors. For instance, the rather obscure discussion in the present work (103) of the understanding of truth and falsity according to al-Ja h m could have been significantly . iz . and his mentor al-Naz .z .a improved if the author had drawn on the rather elegant corresponding analysis in Bohas et al. 1990:129. Similarly, A writes that Ish q b. Wahab distinguished between propositions that can be either .a true or false, and propositions that can neither true nor false such as imperatives and negatives (41). Given that a proposition is defined in logic as a statement that affirms or denies something and that is or can be shown to be either true or false ( Collins English Dictionary ) and that this definition has also become standard in linguistics, As usage here is simply confusing. Bohas and colleagues (1990:12831) distinguish between informative utterances, which can be true or false, and performative utterances (such as interrogatives and imperatives), which cannot be. One might quibble with Bohas and colleagues terminologydeclarative and nondeclarative utterances might, for instance, be better terms for the two types. Their usage, however, is much clearer than that of the present author. Similarly, A translates the term ilm al-ma a n (Ch. 4) as word order. His discussion, however, shows that while word order is involved in ilm al-ma a n , the subdiscipline is only concerned with word order inasmuch as different word orders yield different meanings (of a type that do not affect the truth or otherwise of the utterance), and that it is also concerned with other phenomena such as the use of emphatic particles that also function to yield these kinds of meanings. The more obvious and literal translation of ilm al-ma a n as the science of meanings together with an accompanying definition such as the study of the properties of the structure of utterances in speech and the evaluation thereof, in order to avoid mistakes in the use of language in accordance with the requirements of the situation [of communication] (Bohas et al. 1990:11819, translating al-Sakka k ) would have provided a much clearer explanation. The present work would furthermore have benefited from the English translation equivalents for Arabic grammatical and rhetorical technical terms developed by other authors working in the same field. For example, A uses nominalized noun as a translation of the Arabic mas . dar (76 and elsewhere). Verbal noun has become more or less the standard English translation of mas . dar, and there seems no good reason why A should not have used it. At various other points, the terminology chosen by A is significantly at variance with standard English grammatical usage. For instance, it may make sense from an Arabic perspective to say that the lexical item ( door) enjoys the rhetorical function of an adjective (11). To describe the Arabic word ba b door as an adjective, however, is so at variance with standard English grammatical usage that, from the perspective of anyone principally familiar with the grammatical terminology of English, it seems unacceptable. Numerous other English translations of Arabic grammatical and rhetorical terms are equally problematic. For instance, A chooses to translate muqaddam as foregrounded and muaxxar as backgrounded, rather than preposed (anteposed in Bohas et al. 1990:128) and postposed,

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or even fronted and backed. This choice seems particularly strange given the increasing use of foreground(ed/ing) and background(ed/ing) to describe discourse prominence/nonprominence, sometimes of a kind that relates to grammatical mainness/subordination, but in no cases specifically in relation to word order (see Khalil 2007 for a recent discussion in relation to Arabic). The translation of maja z as allegory (209) is similarly odd. According to Simon (2008: 116), The term maja z, used in both Arabic linguistic thought and in the hermeneutics of the Qura n, is usually translated as trope, although its meaning is not completely congruent with the Western concept. . . . Whether maja z should be translated as trope depends on the author examined. Also somewhat problematic is the books reliance, in the main, on Modern Standard Arabic examples to illustrate the points made, together with a fairly prescriptive approach to the analysis of Arabic. To take one example, it is well known that Modern Standard Arabic makes greater use of sentences with SVO word order (a type of nominal sentence) as compared to Classical Arabic, which makes greater use of VSO word order (verbal sentence) (e.g. Dahlgren 1998). This implies, among other things, a change in rhetorical norms. By simply adopting the analyses of the Classical Arabic rhetoricians, A ignores these changes, imposing Classical Arabic norms onto the rather different Modern Standard language. More generally, the book would have benefited from more rigorous editing. There are numerous cases of unnecessary repetition of ideas, and the text contains many stylistic infelicities as well as grammatical errors at various points. It is ultimately the publishers responsibility to ensure the quality of the language of its publications; the publishers performance in this case is rather disappointing. While there is quite a lot that one might question in this book, the work displays a profound knowledge of the Arabic rhetorical tradition and succeeds in giving Western readers with a strong background in Arabic a fairly detailed survey of the analyses provided by the Classical Arabic rhetoricians.

REFERENCES
ABU DEEB, KAMAL. 1979. Al-Jurja nis theory of poetic imagery. Warminster: Aris and Phillips. AL-SHARAFI, ABDULGABBAR. 2004. Textual metonymy: A semiotic approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan. BEARMAN, P. J.; TH. BIANQUIS; C. E. BOSWORTH; E. VAN DONZEL; and W. P. HEINRICHS (eds.) 19602005. Encyclopedia of Islam. 2nd edn. Leiden: Brill. BOHAS, GEORGES; JEAN-PATRICK GUILLAUME; and DJAMEL EDDINE KOULOUGHLI. 1990. The Arabic linguistic tradition. London: Routledge. BONEBAKKER, SEEGER ANDRIANUS. 1973. Isti a ra. In Bearman et al., vol. 4, 24852. BOULLATA, ISSA. 1988. The rhetorical interpretation of the Qura n: I ja z and related topics. Approaches to the interpretation of the history of the Qura n, ed. by Andrew Rippin, 13957. Oxford: Clarendon. CACHIA, PIERRE. 1998. The arch rhetorician or The schemers skimmer: A handbook of late Arabic bad drawn from Abd Al-Ghan al-Azha r ala Nasama t al-Asha r. Wiesbaden: Otto al-Na buls s Nafaha Harrassowitz. DAHLGREN, SVEN-OLOF. 1998. Word order in Arabic. Go teborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. ya, a tropic device from medieval Arabic rhetoric, and its impact on discourse DICHY, JOSEPH. 2003. Kina theory. Proceedings of the 5th conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), University of Amsterdam, 2528 June 2002, ed. by Frans van Emeren, J. Anthony Blair, Charles A. Willard, and Francisca Snoeck Nenkemanns, 23741. Amsterdam: Sit Sat. NESCU, DANIELA RODICA. 2003. Exclamation in modern literary Arabic: A pragmatic perspective. BuchaFIRA rest: Editura Universita tii din Bucares ti. HEINRICHS, WOLFHART. 1977. The hand of the northwind: Opinions on metaphor and the early meaning of isti a ra in Arabic poetics. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. HEINRICHS, WOLFHART. 1994. On the genesis of the h qa-maja z dichotomy. Studia Islamica 59.11140. . aq HEINRICHS, WOLFHART. 1998. Tadjn s. In Bearman et al., vol. 10, 6770. KHALIL, ESAM N. 2007. Grounding. In Versteegh et al., vol. 2, 20710. LARKIN, MARGARET. 1995. The theology of meaning: Abd al-Qa hir al-Jurja nis theory of discourse. New Haven: American Oriental Society. LEVIN, ARYEH. 1981. The grammatical terms al-musnad, al-musnad ilayhi and al-isna d. Journal of the American Oriental Society 101.14565.

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PELLAT, CHARLES. 1986. Kina ya. In Bearman et al., vol. 5, 11618. SIMON, UDO N. 2008. Maja z. In Versteegh et al., vol. 3, 11623. TALMON, RAFAEL. 1987. Musnad, musnad ilayhi and the early history of Arabic grammar: A reconsideration. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1987.2.20722. VERSTEEGH, KEES. 1997. The Arabic tradition. The emergence of semantics in four linguistic traditions: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, by Wout van Bekkum, Jan Houben, Ineke Sluiter, and Kees Versteegh, 22784. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. VERSTEEGH, KEES; MUSHIRA EID; ALAA ELGIBALI; MANFRED WOIDICH; and ANDRZEJ ZABORSKI (eds.) 20052009. Encyclopedia of Arabic language and linguistics. 4 vols. Leiden: Brill. WATSON, JANET C. E. 1993. A syntax of S n Arabic. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. . an a Maxwell Building School of Languages University of Salford Greater Manchester M5 4WT United Kingdom [J.Dickins@salford.ac.uk]

All about language. By BARRY J. BLAKE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 322. ISBN 9780199238498. $29.95. Reviewed by JAMES R. HURFORD, University of Edinburgh
Barry Blakes book is an introduction aimed at the general reader and at students of language and linguistics (vi). It covers a lot of very familiar ground. In tone and coverage it resembles Fromkin and Rodmans best seller An introduction to language (1974; now in its eighth edition, Fromkin et al. 2006). It is obviously aimed at being adopted as a textbook, as can be seen from the systematic coverage of the traditional introductory linguistics curriculumform classes, morphology, lexical change, lexical semantics, syntax, discourse, phonetics, phonology, writing systems, language variation, historical linguistics, language acquisition, language processing, and language origins. Each of these topics gets a chapter of about twenty-five pages. The written style is lightly academic, not too heavy, but not the popularizing style of Gary Marcus or Steven Pinker. Chapters end with suggestions for further reading and with sets of problem exercises to stimulate active thought. There is a very thorough (thirty-four-page) glossary of terms at the end of the book. The publishers have invested more money than usual in presentation. There are many useful diagrams and illustrations in almost all chapters. The font color switches to green for headings and most examples. Like Fromkin & Rodman, Bs book also tries to lighten up the texts mood with cute cartoon drawings, but these are poorly drawn and unfunny. In the publicity blurb on the back, Fritz Newmeyer is quoted as saying he would adopt Bs book as an introductory text in linguistics. I think I would give it a try, too. The title All about language cleverly hides the writers dilemma. Certainly the entire book is about language, but it is not about all of languagehow could it be? Everything in this book, apart from minor factual details, will be familiar to any academic linguist who has been in the business for a decade or more. It thus presents a very standard view of what the core and scope of the subject are, on the whole a very similar overall view to Fromkin and Rodmans, but with some more up-to-date facts included. To me, this shows how little the enduring core of basic knowledge about language has changed in the last fifty years. Much of the same ground was covered in Hocketts Course in modern linguistics (1958). The chapter on Meaning of words rehearses the same distinctions as Lyonss Semantics (1977). As expected, Grices maxims get three pages, and speech acts another page, and so on, across the whole broad spectrum of linguistics as we have come to know it. Bs book belongs in a fine pedagogical tradition in linguistics, and in terms of his command of the field, is a worthy addition to it. As a twenty-year-old, reading such introductory texts opened up a whole new world of interest to me. That was over forty years ago. I would guess (and certainly hope) that by now, more scientific knowledge about language has filtered down into high school education, so that a book such as Bs would not be such an eye-opener to the current generation of twenty-year-olds.