Repetition och argumentation i samtida arabisk text

Summary, in English

This thesis examines a number of leaflets and political proclamations distributed in and around Cairos Tahrir Square in the early months of 2011. The theoretical frame work for the study is the claims made by Barbara Johnstone that arabic rhetorics - modern and classical - depend primarily on repetition (lexical coupling, paraphrase, parallelism) when construction an argument, and that this has far-reaching implications, ideologically and linguistically. Through an analysis of the frequency and function of repetitive elements in the studied texts a number of conclusions are reached. Firstly, repetition is found to be fairly common in all the texts, undermining claims made that repetition is no longer habitually employed in contemporary arabic text, and supporting Johnstones central thesis. Secondly, and despite this, the results of the study cast substantial doubt on Johnstones conceptualization of repetition, primarily concerning a) the feasibility of a meta-category of "repetition in general" endowed with essential shared characteristics, b) the ideological implications she presents for the use of repetition in rhetorics and c) her claims of a cognitive (rather than stylistic) basis for the use of repetition.

• Author: Sam Carlshamre
• Department/s: Arabic Studies; Master's Programme: Language and Linguistics
• Publishing year: 2012
• Language: Swedish
• Full text: Available as PDF - 6 MB; Download statistics
• Document type: Student publication for Master's degree (one year)
• Topic: Languages and Literatures
• Keywords: Repetition; Arabic rhetoric; Barbara Johnstone; Tahrir
• Supervisor: Lena Ambjörn (Professor)