The Ironic Utterance and the Problematic of Implicit Meaning in Al-Manām al-Kabīr: A Pragmatic Approach

Abstract

This study examines the phenomenon of ironic utterance in Al-Manām al-Kabīr by Ibn Muḥriz al-Wahrānī and seeks to uncover the pragmatic mechanisms through which implicit meaning is generated, employing a critical tool for the analysis of classical literary discourse. The study proceeds from the relationship between what is explicitly stated in the utterance and the meanings implicitly conveyed behind it. It draws upon a set of major pragmatic foundations, most notably Speech Act Theory as formulated by Searle, Grice's Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims, in addition to Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, which conceives irony as an implicit echoic mention of a proposition manifested through the phenomenon of free indirect discourse.

The study adopts an analytical approach based on selected textual examples that progress from self-directed irony founded upon the collapse of the speaker's discourse about himself, to descriptive irony based on exaggeration, then to dialogic, polyphonic irony, and finally to irony that interweaves historical doctrinal criticism with contemporary social criticism through the technique of internal intertextuality. The study demonstrates that al-Wahrānī does not employ irony merely as a rhetorical device; rather, he elevates it to a complex discursive strategy that deconstructs authority and exposes social and political contradictions through the duality of explicit and implicit meaning.