Structures Denoting Hunger in Bushra Khalfan's Dilshad - A Study in Light of the Grammatical Case Theory –

Abstract

   The research entitled "Structures Indicating Hunger in the Novel 'Dilshad' by Bushra Khalfan - A Study in Light of Case Grammar Theory" is a study of linguistic structures according to the "Case Grammar" theory established by American linguist Charles Fillmore. This is one of the semantic theories that attempts to answer an important question: how meaning is formed in the mind and transformed into spoken structures. It makes the verb the central element in the sentence, requiring the arrangement of specific elements in the structure according to the law of lexical selection, seeking to reveal the semantic roles of basic verbs and their requirements for different grammatical cases including: agentive, objectivity, addition, collocations, direction, locative and time relations, at the deepest level of grammatical analysis, to reach the most precise and clearest meanings. This is not only through inflectional movements, but by examining the deep meanings carried by structures. Since the novel "Dilshad" is one of the distinguished literary texts in which the author used all her linguistic capabilities to highlight aspects of the bitter relationship between hunger and humanity, where she narrated types of physical and metaphorical hunger through various expressions that portray the reality of physical and spiritual life and the impact of hunger's harshness on humans, we worked to highlight the role of verbs as a central and fundamental element in structures indicating hunger, and to discover the semantic relationships between these verbs and the nominal elements that complement them semantically. This was done by following the descriptive-analytical methodology.