The Implicit Addressee in the Arabic Legacy and the Discourse Analysis Approaches

Abstract

According to the model of communication, the communicative process consists of three main elements: the speaker, the message, and the addressee. The message contains meaning, the speaker is the producer of the (intended) meaning, and the addressee is to understand and/or interpret the (intended) meaning.

               In this model, the speaker may choose to explicitly or implicitly produce the meaning, which leads to the probability of having an explicit and/or implicit message. The addressee has to retrieve the implicit meaning by observing the context.

               Thus, meaning and intention remain the concern of modern linguistic studies, in terms of their production, reception, and interpretation. Numerous linguistic theories have emerged to investigate these key elements along with the immediate context and code and the impact they have on the speaker's inclusion of meanings and intentions as well as the addressee’s ability to interpret and infer them. These theories have focused on the speaker's intention and the types of meanings, in terms of the explicit and implicit, or the speaker's interpretation.

               However, there is a spoken phenomenon to which many studies have paid great attention that we did not find in other theories of discourse analysis, which is the phenomenon of (communicative implicitness) or (implicit addressee), which I can call (discourse orientation) or (discourse orientation technique), a phenomenon that the ancient Arab rhetoricians and fundamentalists paid attention to, and included it within their rhetorical research called “implicitness”. However, the ancient Arabs did not escape from misdiagnosing this phenomenon, necessitating the need to discuss and correct their opinions.

               Hence, the research identifies its problem by investigating the method of rhetorical orientation and by defining its concept in addition to differentiating it from other methods that are related to meaning. Our starting point in all this is to analyse the uses of the ancient rhetoricians and what modern ones have checked, on one hand, and what modern linguists have stated, from the other hand.