نحو النص في رسالة ابن زيدون الهزلية Text Linguistics in Ibn Zaydun’s Satirical Epistle Section Articles

Abstract

Text Linguistics in Ibn Zaydun’s Satirical Epistle

Introducing Ibn Zaydun and His Work:

Ibn Zaydun was raised under the care of his grandfather and the affection of his mother, with whom he had a very special relationship, especially since he was her only child. This relationship had a great impact on the formation of his narcissistic personality. He grew up admiring himself and being proud of his youth and handsomeness. His mother’s influence on him was stronger than that of his grandfather.

Ibn Zaydun became passionately fond of arts, music, and singing. All these circumstances surrounding his upbringing had a profound effect on his life. He grew up as a young man who was highly proud of his wealth, lineage, and noble descent, and extremely ambitious, with no limits to his ambition. This ambition later became the reason for his imprisonment.

Ibn Zaydun wrote a satirical epistle while he was in prison. It was conveyed by Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, speaking in her own voice, to Ibn ‘Abdus, who was competing with him for her love. This epistle contained satire, mockery, resentment, and spite, and it revealed the strength and intensity of Ibn Zaydun’s character. In it, he was influenced by Al-Jahiz’s “The Epistle of Squaring and Rounding.” This epistle was later explained by the man of letters Ibn Nubata in the year 768 AH in a book entitled “Sarh al-‘Uyun fi Sharh Risalat Ibn Zaydun.”

Defining Text Linguistics and Its Foundations:

Text linguistics is a branch of general linguistics that studies the text as the largest linguistic unit. It clarifies many aspects of the text, including cohesion and coherence, their types and tools, reference and its types, textual context, and the role of participants in the text during its production and reception, whether spoken or written.

Text linguistics is a type of analysis that employs complex research tools, whose analytical capacity extends beyond the sentence level, in addition to examining the relationships of syntactic components within the sentence (intra-sentential constituents). Relations beyond the sentence include hierarchical levels that begin with relations between sentences (inter-sentential relations), then the paragraph, and finally the complete text (or discourse). Text linguistics is described as the science that aims to describe the conditions and constraints of human communication, as well as to describe its organization.

Most historians of text linguistics believe that it is difficult to attribute this field to a specific scholar, to confine it to a particular country, school, or trend, or to date it to a specific year. However, they agree that its distinctive features appeared in the late 1970s, when linguistic studies during that period witnessed a tendency toward focusing on textual issues and adopting the text itself as a subject of study.

Since traditional linguistic studies take the sentence as the major linguistic unit of analysis, those who immersed themselves in early research on the text sought indications—mentioned by some researchers—that open the way to going beyond the sentence and do not require stopping at it, considering them early beginnings of text linguistics.

Structure of the Research Paper:

The research paper includes an introduction that presents a definition of the author and the book, followed by an introduction to text linguistics and its foundations. It also contains sections that include examples of text linguistics in nominal sentences, verbal sentences, and stylistic structures. Finally, the paper concludes with a conclusion that presents the most important results reached by the research.