Rhetorical features of cursing and swearing in contemporary masters of muǧūn: Muẓaffar an-Nawwāb and Naǧīb Surūr

Studies in pragmatics accurately claim that cursing and venomous expressions are influenced by conversational variables such as the speaker-listener relationship, the communication’s contextual setting and the implicatures (Searle 1969; Grice 1975). Within the Arabic linguistics tradition and mostly due to al-Ǧurǧānī’s revolutionary semantic approach (Sweity 1994), these variables are one of the main fields of inquiry with respect to al-balāgha (Ghersetti 1998). The linguistic naẓm of cursing and swearing and their features such as brevity (īǧāz), deep communicative impact (ṭab‛ balīgh) and resort to figurative speech (luṭf li-l-maǧāz) reveal how these expressions are clearly based on rhetorical patterns. The rhetorical pattern of illocutionary acts of cursing is used not only to alienate the listener from the conversation but also, at times, to deeply engage him or her within it when the dispute is a tamthiliyya (simulation), as with jokes (Beebe 1995) or with figurative – such as poetic – expressions. This paper aims to observe rhetorical features of cursing when it is employed as literary language in some poetic genres such as the muǧūn, also drawing upon in-depth analysis of contemporary examples such as those of Muẓaffar an-Nawwāb and Naǧīb Surūr.