The lexical item Sheikh in the first Abbasid poetry Tracing the item's semantic (literal) content and its contextual (pragmatic) use

Abstract

This paper employs a morphological and etymological approach, tackles a lexical item used to be semantically and pragmatically salient in the literary sense of language context (contextual factors). This paper traces item's semantic (literal) content and its contextual (pragmatic) use in the first Abbasid poetry. The main concern of this paper is to show the unanimous agreement on the contextual meaning of the lexical item entails working out the meaning of the utterance at the moment of speech and this is called within the aegis of structuralism a synchronic analysis. On the basis of the synchronic analysis, this paper has adopted different dimensions. They encompass respectively; the methodical restrictions that specify its methodology and its data collection approaches, lexical clarification, an analysis of this lexical item "Sheikh" as used in representative symbols in the pre-Islamic poetry and as used in the holy Quran. The two latter uses (In the holy Quran and in the pre-Islamic poetry) were employed as a standard against which the areas of similarities and differences between former uses and subsequent uses are shown. Subsequently , the paper elaborates and analyzes this lexical item with regards to the first Abbasid poetry, and this is the main concern of this research. Finally, it displays a conclusion and an abstract that sums up the research. This paper concludes that the lexical item "Sheikh" has never undergone any semantic change on the context era. However, for it to maintain its old use indeed doesn't hinder the appearance of new denotations or connotations and this comes from its character which enables it to realize these new semantic roles .