Pragmatic Trends and the Multiplicity of Meaning

(Hazza al-Rawʿ by Imruʾ al-Qays as a Case Study)

Abstract

 This study aims to examine the effectiveness of contemporary pragmatic trends in reading poetic discourse as a meaning-generating practice that contributes to shaping a worldview in light of context, intention, and pragmatic effect, as well as to forming the social and value-based perceptions within which the discourse operates. The study moves from theoretical exposition to procedural application by adopting the poem Hazza al-Rawʿ by Imruʾ al-Qays as an analytical model.

The research begins by grounding the concept of pragmatics in both its Western and Arabic contexts, highlighting its shift from the analysis of everyday language (the zero level) to its application in the analysis of elevated poetic language. It then proceeds to trace the emergence of pragmatic trends and to examine four major approaches: the philosophical pragmatic approach, the structural linguistic pragmatic approach, the cognitive pragmatic approach, and the critical pragmatic approach, in terms of their ability to interpret implicit intentions, speech acts, discursive strategies, shared knowledge, and the ideological dimension of poetic texts.

The study adopts descriptive and analytical methods, applying the tools of each pragmatic approach independently, followed by a comparative analysis to reveal the limits of each approach and its interpretive depth. The study concludes that Arabic poetry, including pre-Islamic poetry, cannot be adequately analyzed through reliance on a single pragmatic approach. Rather, it requires an integrative pragmatic framework that brings together speech acts, linguistic structure, cognitive context, and the social and ideological dimensions embedded in discourse, thereby opening new horizons for developing a more suitable Arabic pragmatic model for reading the Arabic poetic heritage.