Siham Mohammed Hasan Sadiq Alkawwaz

The investigation of juncture, as a poetic device, involves an area of study that straddles the boundary between linguistics and literary studies and in each of which juncture plays a distinct role. Juncture serves as a suprasegmental phonemic cue, being a means to signal the borders of most words and groups of words in speech. In literary language, it contributes in creating a type of ambiguity that enriches texts with multiple meanings and thus poetic effects. While considerable work has been done to explore the significance of juncture in speech, very poor attention has been given to its role in literature. This study, therefore, takes this role by probing the poetic aspects of juncture that govern its use in literary texts. It also analyses some texts to show its mechanism to produce poetic effects. The study concludes that juncture serves as a device of style to create phonological ambiguity necessary for wordplay.

The term pun refers to a common rhetorical device that involves playing upon words which are similar in form but different in meaning. It seems to be a universal phenomenon since it appears in literatures of all natural languages. In Arabic, it is observed that Arab authors are at odds when they write about this device. They often differ in identifying what represents it in Arabic rhetoric to the extent that they refer to distinctly different devices as its counterparts like tawriya, jinās or sometimes both. This draws a lot of confusion and raises some inquiries: Does tawriya equate jinās? if not, which one may represent pun in English? and what are the main reasons that have often caused such confusion and mismatching? Therefore, the present paper aims at investigating the rhetorical devices which are similar in their mechanism to the phenomenon of punning in English in an attempt to figure out what represents it in Arabic. It also draws attention to the formal typology of this device in English to illustrate the sense of mismatching which have appeared in previous studies when referring to its counterparts in Arabic.

This study attempts to present a complete picture, as much as possible, of pun in Arabic as a rhetorical device that stands as a bridge between rhetoric and linguistics. As no independent work has been done in Arabic that deals with punning as a semantic issue the study addresses itself to bridge this gap by investigating the linguistic aspects of this hybrid phenomenon. It aims to provide a semantic account for pun or, the so called ‘tawriya’ in Arabic that uncovers the nature of words being involved in. It also proposes a classificatory system for categorizing puns semantically into the following types: Polysemous, naming, homonymous, homophonous and idiomatic.