The Poetic Function in Roman Jakobson’s Model of Communication: From the Dominant to the Principle of Equivalence

Abstract

This study examines the place of the poetic function in Roman Jakobson's conception of verbal communication and explores the relationship between the hierarchy of language functions and the linguistic features through which poetic discourse is organized. It proceeds from the hypothesis that the dominant determines the position of the poetic function within the structure of the message, and that the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination accounts for the message's phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic organization. Adopting a descriptive-analytical approach, the study combines an examination of the concepts developed in Jakobson's writings with an assessment of their explanatory power in Arabic poetry. It takes the opening lines of a poem by Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī as the basis for analyzing syntactic parallelism, derivational affinity, and semantic contrast, in light of the linguistic characteristics of Arabic and the panegyric context. The analysis reveals how these relationships interact to shape meaning and how their interplay contributes to the predominance of the poetic function over the other functions of discourse. The findings thus demonstrate the value of the dominant and the principle of equivalence in explaining the relationship between the function of the message and its structural organization, while taking into account the poem's context and the conventions governing its reception.