The Interaction of Language Levels in Literary Texts and Their Impact on Meaning Construction

(An Applied Linguistic Study)

Abstract

This work aims to determine the interactive nature of the linguistic analysis levels ( phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic, and pragmatic) in the literary text and demonstrate how the interactions create the meaning of the text. The issue that is focused in the work is that many of the applied linguistics studies of the literary texts are confined to one of the analysis levels, ignoring the interactions between the levels of analysis that lead to partial comprehension of the meaning of literature. The author argues that the meaning of the literature is not created by the one level of linguistic analysis, but rather appears due to the interactions of different levels within the text, a concept that derives from the idea of Tammam Hassan (1973) of the principle of "convergence of contextual indicators" (taḍāfur al-qaraʾin). The research uses the descriptive-analytical method and relies on the text linguistics described by Robert de Beaugrande (1998), the theory of textual cohesion developed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), and the stylistic theory existent by Salah Fadl (1992, 1998), applying these concepts experimentally on the model of classical Arabic poetry and prose. The study reveals that analyzing the literary texts through one level of linguistic analysis and suggests that analysis needs to integrate different levels of analysis for the construction of multilayer meaning. The author suggests conducting more extensive applied research on modern literature based on this integrative approach with the assistance of computational linguistics.