Semantic parallelism in the Dinariyah Maqama of Badī' al-Zaman al-Hamadhānī

Abstract

Parallelism is a pivotal element in achieving the coherence and internal harmony of a text. It is also an effective tool for persuading and influencing the recipient through repetitive and parallel structures that reinforce the idea and cement it in the reader's mind. Parallelism is not something unique to poetic language. There are patterns of literary prose that constitute the harmonious principle of parallelism. Among these prose patterns are...

Subject to the principle of close parallelism or representative with poetry, that distinctive literary art that appeared in the era of weakness when the Arabic language collapsed, and mixed with foreign and Arabized, and the melody in the language became widespread, so its owners called it the Maqamat, and parallelism in the art of prose is distinguished by its reliance on a structure based on the principle of proximity, thus distinguishing it from poetry, whose structure is based on the principle of similarity. In this research paper, the researchers attempt to follow an integrated approach that combines the approach Stylistic and structural approaches, utilizing some mechanisms of pragmatic analysis, study the aesthetics of semantic parallelism in the Dinar Maqama by Badī' al-Zaman al-Hamadhānī. The study reveals the diversity of indicators of semantic parallelism in the Dinar Maqama, where the phenomenon of contrast emerged in opposing pairs and synonymy was manifested in the accumulation of semantically similar vocabulary to emphasize the meaning, as in the description of the dinar. The study also monitored the phenomenon of semantic proportionality in the harmony of lexical fields related to money and social status, in addition to the semantic gradation that appeared in the escalation of descriptions of cases of poverty and wealth. The study also revealed Al-Hamadhani’s use of the phenomenon of semantic inclusion and semantic contrast in constructing the paragraphs of the Maqama, which contributed to the coherence of the text and its semantic richness. The study concluded that the semantic parallelism in the Dinariyah Maqama, It represents a conscious stylistic strategy used by Al-Hamadhani to create a coherent text with multiple semantic layers, combining the beauty of form and the depth of content, and transcending the limits of verbal craftsmanship to the horizons of emotional and intellectual influence in a communicative context governed by the culture of his time and the expectations of its recipients, which makes the Dinariyah Maqama a unique model of literary creativity that employs semantic parallelism at all levels to achieve artistic and persuasive goals.