Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1
Associate Professor, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, Kharazmi University, Tehran
2
PhD student, Arabic Language and Literature, Kharazmi University, Tehran
Abstract
How words are chosen, as well as how they are put together in sentences, have an important role in conveying the intended meaning to the audience. Studying and analyzing each person's style carefully will help us greatly in understanding the implications of its effects. The style is the way to create the idea, and to highlight it in the appropriate verbal form. Stylistics is the analysis of an expression, a description of its purpose, and its effect. Finch believes that stylistics is one area of modern linguistics that analyzes literary styles. Each choice of language can be considered a stylistic indicator. The main task of stylistics is to examine the type of word choice, and why one option is preferred over the other.
There are multiple trends in this field, including: Statistical stylistics, and all studies around it have been conducted on the assumption that finger print is possible. Statistical stylistics is one of the most important recent trends of new rhetoric that studies the characteristics of writing style. Each author creates a style unique to himself through the special placement of words. Statistical methods by converting quantity to quality, lead to scientific judgment on the studied texts. One of the most notable stylistic features is “vocabulary richness” that can be used to analyze literary styles. The basis of vocabulary richness theories is that the fewer words in a text are repeated in relation to another text, the more vocabulary richness it has.
The imams are more interested in taking into account the context of the public situation than any other person, and they convey to them the required concepts by choosing the appropriate words. In this research, we shed light on the method of writing, and the choice of words by Imam Ali (peace be upon him) in the letters of Nahj al-Balaghah to obtain the degree of similarity of how it was stated in the letters, as well as how to use the repeated vocabulary appropriately with the situation of the addressee, through the descriptive-analytical, and statistical approach.
For this purpose, we chose Johnson's theory and Honore's equation to calculate vocabulary richness. Since one of the conditions for improving the application of vocabulary richness theories is the equality of the number of vocabulary selected texts, as well as their similarity in some areas, we select the messages that have similar topics.
The messages of Nahj al-Balagha have been classified into 19 categories according to their different topics:
1- historical, political; 2- political; 3- Ethical, economic; 4- Military, political; 5- Ethical, political; 6- political, belief; 7- Military; 8- Military, moral; 9- Ethical; 10- Economic; 11- Ethical, political, historical, doctrinal; 12- Ethical, educational, historical, belief, economic, political, scientific; 13- political, economic; 14- Ethical, political, belief; 15- political, moral, economic; 16- Spiritual, devotional; 17- political, moral, economic, devotional; 18- historical; 19- Political, scientific.
In this research, the second category (ie political messages) was selected, which contains 23 messages. We choose five messages from this category as the sample for research. The letter No. 29, 33, 35, 38 and 63 is our statistical community, and by comparing its vocabulary richness, we study the degree of similarity in the writing style of Imam Ali (peace be upon him) on the similar subject.
The number of words for the selected samples in this study ranges between 84 and 138, and since one of the conditions for a good comparison is an equal number of vocabulary words for the studied texts, to apply Johnson’s theory we choose the first 80 words for each of the selected letters, and divide each sample into four parts (20 words). Then we draw an independent table for all samples, and cross out each repeated word, according to the frequency criteria. For the R equation, after counting the words used once, as well as the non-recurring words, we calculate the value of the equation for each of the letters selected in this study.
One of the most important results that we reached is that the difference of the highest vocabulary richness and the lowest for the selected letters, according to Johnson’s theory, is 11%, and according to Honore’s equation is only 15%, and this is indicative of the similar style of writing political letters from Nahj al-Balaghah. However, the slight difference between the vocabulary richness of the selected samples is related to the influence of the circumstances and reasons for writing each of these letters, for example: the type of the addressee, how he behaves, the need to deal with him, encouragement or incitement to an important matter, and these differences are not to the point of causing great differences in the style of the letters.
Keywords
Main Subjects
)