The Role of Speech Act in Clarifying Meaning in Al-Zamakhsharī’s Dictionary: Asās al-Balāgha

Abstract

This study demonstrates how speech-act theory clarifies semantic nuance in al-Zamakhsharī’s lexicon Asās al-Balāgha. After a brief preface sketching the author’s background, the dictionary’s aims, and the historical roots of speech-act theory in Arab scholarship, the paper unfolds through five analytic sections that track Searle’s taxonomy: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declaratives. Working within a pragmatic framework, it shows that al-Zamakhsharī embeds each lexical root in richly figurative sentences whose illocutionary force—whether reporting, requesting, promising, emoting, or proclaiming—helps readers discriminate among similar meanings and recognize context-bound shifts. The investigation reveals that classical Arab lexicographers were keenly aware, albeit implicitly, of what modern theory calls speech acts: they did not present vocabulary as static entries but as living utterances that perform social actions. Findings confirm that speech acts provide a powerful lens for explaining why Asās al-Balāgha remains so valuable to writers and poets: its examples move beyond bare definition to model how words achieve persuasive, artistic, and rhetorical effects across diverse communicative situations.