A Pragmatic Analysis of Political Meaning in Abdullah Pashew’s Poem 'Meeting'

Abstract

The current paper analyzes the political meaning of Abdullah Pashew's poem “meeting” based on pragmatics perspective. The aim of the study is to investigate the used language of the poem and analyze the codes and hidden messages that the poet wants to convey based on the shared knowledge, background, and common understanding. The study attempts to verify the fact that the poet targets the two main political parties in Kurdistan Region; besides, the paper tries to shed light on the calls for awareness by the poet to the Kurdish people through focusing on some pragmatics elements' analyses, particularly Implicature. Descriptive qualitative method is used through depending on the pragmatic components, shared knowledge of Kurdish people and Pashew's background of writing, particularly: Implicature, Explicature, Entailment, Inference and Presupposition. The study concludes that Pashew criticizes the two major parties by being corrupted and opportunist for power and finance, the two main reasons of disagreement between them. Besides, the poet also tries to encourage people to refuse those phenomenon and claim for their rights from the official figures.

Pragmatics is one of the branches of linguistics which deals with meaning in context according to the situation that semantics fails to analyze. Pragmatics briefly is the study of the language use by the speaker that cannot take place only through the linguistic knowledge. On the other hand, pragmatics solves the point of meaning or the message that the listener receives. Pragmatics generally deals with the principles that are followed by both speakers and listeners in their communication.  Hence, it is referred as ‘the waste-paper basket of semantics’