Date-Palms Language and The Power of Kno PDF

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier.
The attached
copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research
and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution
and sharing with colleagues.
Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or
licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party
websites are prohibited.
In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the
article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or
institutional repository. Authors requiring further information
regarding Elseviers archiving and manuscript policies are
encouraged to visit:
http://www.elsevier.com/copyright
Author's personal copy
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Date-palms, language and the power of knowledge:

An analysis of a fable from Kalila and Dimna
Bahaa-eddin M. Mazid *
Department of Translation Studies, College of Humanities & Social Sciences, UAE University, P.O. Box 17771, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates
Received 26 May 2007; received in revised form 25 April 2009; accepted 29 April 2009
Abstract
The paper examines one of the fables in the Persian-Arab Abbasid prose writer Abdullah Ibn Al-Muqaffas translation/
adaptation Kalila and Dimna The Fable of the Crow and the Partridge within its own frame and story. The paper addresses the
issues of context and contextomy, the power of knowledge and of language, metaphors of foreign language learning,
interlanguage, communication contexts, ideology of the fable genre and narrative embedding and blending and layers of narration,
and provides a fairly detailed discourse analytical description of the fable. One central argument the paper makes is that fables of
this kind should be critically revisited so that their timeless truths, which may prove to be neither timeless nor true, may be
uncovered. The authorities of an author, a Philosopher and a hermit which respectively occasion a seemingly realistic Philosopher
King frame, a hermitguest story and a crow-partridge fable, discouraging self-improvement and social mobility, in the case of the
present fable, should be situated in a socio-historical context and scrutinized rather than be taken for granted.
# 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Fable; Narrative embedding; Blending; Layers of narrative; Contextomy; Manipulation; Power of knowledge and knowledge of power
1. Introduction
Maybe it is no big deal that classic literature provides universally applicable insights that are relevant to
common, everyday commerce . . . but maybe it is (Metcalf, 2005:254).
Kalila and Dimna the first work of literary prose narrative in Arabic (Wacks, 2003:179) is an adaptation by
Ibn Al-Muqaffa (c720756), a Persian author and translator who lived in Baghdad, into Arabic from the Pehlevi
version in the eighth century. The source of Kalila and Dimna can be traced back to the Sanskrit Mirror for Princes that
was compiled by an unknown author around 300 CE and entitled the Pancatantra (Five Books or Five Cases of
Cleverness). The Sanskrit tales were translated in the sixth century CE into Middle Persian (Pehlevi) by the physician
Burzuya (or Burzoy). In addition to the tales of the Pancatantra, Burzuya incorporated various other stories into his
An expanded version of a paper presented under the title Who is afraid of foreign languages? Revisiting an old myth at the 9th Annual UAE
University Research Conference, April 2122, 2008. The focus of the presentation was on the ideology of learning a foreign language. A complete
translation into English of the fable examined in this article, together with some notes on its metaphors, among other things, appears in Mazid
(2007).
* Tel.: +971 50 7331987.
E-mail addresses: feminiba@yahoo.com, bahaa.mazid@uaeu.ac.ae.
0378-2166/$ see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.04.007
2516
B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534
corpus, from the Mahabharata epic and other Hindu and Buddhist sources. Burzuyas Pehlevi title, Karirak ud
Damanak, was derived from the names of two jackals, Karataka and Damanaka, the principal characters in the first
book of the Pancatantra. Ibn al-Muqaffas Kalila wa Dimna is therefore an Arabic rendering of Burzuyas now lost
Karirak ud Damanak, although the Arab author also inserted a number of additions into his final work (e.g., Suleman,
2006; Pancatantra, 2007).
This paper examines one of the fables in Ibn Al-Muqaffas translation/adaptation the fable of the Crow and the
Partridge within its own frame and story, all of which belong to the chapter of the hermit and his guest, and provides a
critical discourse-narrative analysis thereof. The hermitguest frame and the Crow-Partridge fable are on pages 356
358 of the 4th edition of the print version published by Dar Al-Andalus, Beirut.
The text the fable, the frame and the story is a good opportunity for exploring many issues in discourse
and narrative. The treatment thereof in this article starts with a review of the relevant literature on rereading fables
for academic and educational purposes and the place of narrative in a critical perspective on language. Then, a
discussion of the major theoretical notions and models used in the analysis of the fable is provided. The theoretical
background specifically elaborates on the fable genre, narrative embedding and blending, manipulation and how to
analyze a fable.
The examination of the fable text is grounded in a discussion of the overall context of Kalila and Dimna and the
purposes its author/translator outlines in his introduction to the Arabic version of the famous fables. A summary of
the sample fable is then provided, followed by a discussion of its most important tools the fable genre itself and the
technique of narrative embedding and the blending of narrative spaces that it involves. The article then provides a more
detailed analysis of the moves and shifts in the fable and its surrounding frame and story. This detailed analysis is
followed by a note on the three parallel dyads in the frame, the story and the fable, some functional grammar aspects of
the fable and a discussion of the salient metaphors generated by the blending of the three narrative layers.
Moving out of the fable, the article discusses some instances of contextomy, of the appropriation of the fable in
contemporary Arab-Islamic culture for communicative purposes without enough context, or the mapping of an
individual experience onto varied social and political situations and arguments. Finally, the article discusses the
power-relations, politics and ideology in the frame, the story and the fable, and concludes with a wrap-up and an
argument for critically rereading fables the fable of the Crow and the Partridge being only a case in point.
2. Fables are new today: review and rationale
Storytelling can be an effective strategy for doing many things: for linking the past and the present, for interpreting
the past and predicting the future and for managing conflict in an organization or a community (Jameson, 2001).
Narrative is also an important tool for understanding people, through their personal or special stories, and
organizations or communities, through their everyday or cultural stories (Jabri, 2006:364).
Pedagogically, narrative texts can be used in teaching many modern and contemporary concepts and constructs,
e.g., in strategic management because stories communicate a variety of concepts and constructs in a concise manner
(Henricks, 2001). Great teachers have long favored parables as pedagogical tools because parables convey rich
lessons in a format that is poignant, straightforward, and memorable (Short and Ketchen, 2005:817). Narration has
always been an important tool for legitimation (Seguin, 2001; see also van Leeuwen, 2007, cited below) and
socialization.
That fables, parables and allegories are effective ways of elucidating modern concepts and constructs has been
illustrated by a good number of studies in the area of management and management education. For example, Barnett
and Hansen (1996) use the concept of the Red Queen from Carrolls Through the Looking Glass to explain
contemporary competitive landscape, Stevenson (1996) uses Shakespeares Henry V and Richard III to illustrate and
compare different leadership styles, Bumpus (2000) uses the novel Brothers and Sisters to teach human resource
management and Short and Ketchen (2005) use Aesops Fables to elucidate a variety of management concepts:
the Fable of the Ass and the Grasshopper to talk about the problem of resource immobility, the Fable of the Lion and
the Dolphin to illustrate compatibility in mergers and alliances and the Fable of the Bundle of Sticks to explain vision
and mission.
Metcalf (2005:256) reports on the use of Orwells Animal Farm as a case study in leadership and management in
nursing. Metcalf underscores the creativity of the endeavor: When the narrative of an aging pig (Old Major) is
suddenly a quest for shared governance within a hospital; when an equine workaholic (Boxer) exhausted in the service
2517
of empty promises is clearly whats-his-name across the hall in Cleos department; or when an animal-friend
(Napoleon) becomes a human-enemy just as a trusted colleague becomes a duplicitous administrator, creative thinking
is evident.
In the areas more closely related to language, linguistics and translation. It is interesting to note that some of the
most profound and influential conceptualizations of the issues of the power of language and the language of power, of
manipulation and inscription, and by extension, of translation, have been articulated in fables and allegories, e.g.,
Orwells Animal Farm, parts of Swifts Gullivers Travels, Shakespeares Tempest, interpreted allegorically, Friels
Translations and Carrolls Alice in the Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Carrolls Humpty Dumpty and his
views on language are very difficult to forget. Orwells newspeak, doublespeak and his views on the power of
language and the language of power in his 1984 have been important starting points for any critical perspective on
language and discourse. A host of contemporary -speaks has already materialized, e.g., MediaSpeak, Salespeak,
Sensationspeak, Hatespeak, Alienspeak and Celebspeak (Fox, 2000), thanks to Orwells pioneering insights. (For an
investigation of pragmatic concepts in the works of Lewis Carroll, see Lakoff, 1993a and Downing, 2000; for some
notes on the relevance of Orwells ideas to critical linguistics, see Fowler et al., 1979; Fowler and Kress, 1979; Ermida,
2006.) Fables have gone in many directions too many for one partial review to comprehend. In the discipline of
nursing, to give just one more example, the fable has been shown to be useful as a hermeneutic mode of inquiry that
focuses on interpretation and understanding (Parse, 1998; Milton, 2006).
The broad genre of narrative has been treated as an important means of achieving persuasion and doing many other
things with language in critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis (e.g., van Dijk, 1993). The four major
strategies of legitimation, or the linguistic enactment of a speakers right to be obeyed (Cap, 2008:22) propounded
by van Leeuwen (2007:92) include narrative as an important tool for establishing and/or maintaining legitimacy of
action, cause or ideology Mythopoesis, that is, legitimation conveyed through narratives whose outcomes reward
legitimate actions and punish non-legitimate actions.
Narrative is an important tool that contributes to a positive representation of self and/or a negative representation of
other (two concepts which van Dijk (e.g., 1998) has developed into a full-fledged ideological square and which
parallel the shield-and-weapon (Allan and Burridge, 2006), (Classical Arabic) beautifying-and-uglifying (van Gelder,
2003), idealizing-and-demonizing uses of pragma-linguistic devices), especially when stories are told as personally
experienced (van Dijk, 1993:264), or as extracted from credible sources and authorities. The more vivid, the more
moving, the funnier and the more credible, the more likely stories, or anecdotes and testimonials, are to contribute
to a persuasive message in a speech, an interview or an advertisement/commercial (cf. Zeuschner, 2003:215).
This richness of the narrative genre, ranging from the very personal and special to the cultural and collective, from
subjective accounts to overarching narratives of our culture (Shepherd, 1995:356) is one explanation of the
narrative turn which Squire (2005) associates with other turns in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: turns to
qualitative methods, to language, to the biographical, to the unconscious, to participant-centred research, to ecological
research, to the social (in psychology), to the visual (in sociology and anthropology), to power, to culture, to reflexivity
. . . the list is long and various (Squire, 2005:9192).
Short and Ketchens (2005) argument that teaching strategic management requires a delicate balance between
articulating classic truths while also highlighting the complexities created by the modern competitive environment
and that illustration of strategic management concepts via the exposition of classic literature creates a vehicle that
naturally facilitates such balance (2005:829) can be extended, very cautiously especially when it comes to classic
truths, to the exposition and/or illustration of some basic concepts and constructs in communication and discourse
analysis through a rereading of a fable from Kalila and Dimna.
Most of the tales in Kalila and Dimna, interpolated or nested within the matrix frame of the conversation
between the King Dabshalim and the Philosopher Baydapa, are political in nature, and warn against misleading
appearances and deceptive behavior (Wacks, 2003:182). The introductory comment on the fables dune part a`
lethique politique, exprimant sa conception du pouvoir, dautre part au savoir necessaire a` lhomme pour se bien
conduire sur terre cleverly captures an important triangle which is so ubiquitous throughout the fables: politic
(al ethic)s, power and knowledge.
Yet, the Arabic adaptation of the famous fables, compared, for example, with Aesops and La Fontaines, has not
received enough attention as far as their political-ideological aspects are concerned, partly because of the general
attitude in Arab culture to avoid troublesome issues and partly because of the inadequate attention to Arabic
wisdom literature at large. The sheer copiousness and ubiquitousness of this mostly apophthegmatic literature
2518
(Gutas, 1981:49) may be one reason why it has not received adequate (critical discourse) research attention. One more
explanation may be found in the relative importance Western scholarship has accorded to the Arabic version of Kalila
and Dimna, compared, for example, with the Arabian Nights the grand book of Arabian tales.
The fables of Kalila and Dimna, or variations thereon, although they employ the same technique of embedding or
framing and depart from a similar conversational frame, have existed in many languages other than Arabic. The erotic
elements and the Arab culture-specific flavor which characterize the Nights, but not Kalila and Dimna, might be
another reason for the lack of proportion in translation and critical investigation. A collection of fables as pervasive in
Arab-Islamic culture as Kalila and Dimna deserves more than reproduction and adaptation.
The Crow and the Partridge of this article also appear in Mazid (2007) where there is a complete translation of their
fable, within its frame, into English from the Arabic adaptation, a discussion of the metaphors of translation therein, a
partial note on the possibility of reading the whole story as an instance of beautifying the ugly (lack of ambition and
immobility) and uglifying the beautiful (learning and self-improvement) and a suggestion that van Leeuwens (2007)
four legitimation strategies authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization and mythopoesis can be easily
identified in the whole chapter of the hermit and the guest (Mazid, 2007:1419). As already indicated in the
introduction above, there is still more to say about the fable and its frame about the creation of a PhilosopherKing
frame to trigger a hermitguest story and end up with a crow-partridge fable, all underlining a moral of
discouragement and immobility, say about the manipulation of religion as a source of unquestionable authority in
order to pass questionable statements and the means of legitimating those statements as well as the citation of the fable,
outside its context, in modern Arabic journalistic writing where the fiction becomes fact, and about the three layers
frame, story and fable and how they are blended into a narrative whole.
3. Theoretical background
In this section, the major theoretical constructs and models used in examining the sample fable are discussed. Basic
concepts of speech act theory, critical discourse analysis, e.g., legitimation, narratology, e.g., narrative voice or pointof-view and the varying roles of character, narrator and interlocutor, and systemic functional grammar, e.g., transitivity
and process types, unless a working in situ explanation is given, are more or less taken for granted. The article does not
offer a pure functional or critical discourse analysis of the fable. Only some components of such analysis are used. This
is perhaps why critical discourse analysis is not capitalized or acronymized throughout.
3.1. What is (in) a fable?
A fable is an animal story a story where the main characters are animals that act and speak like humans which
conveys a moral lesson, normally a warning, e.g., Aesops Fables. In modern usage, it can also mean a lie or an untruth
or a falsehood. A parable is a short narrative or metaphor which illustrates a concept and gives a moral or religious
lesson. A parable is more closely associated with religious texts, e.g., Quranic and Biblical parables such as Good
Samaritan and Grain of Corn.
The terms fable and parable are sometimes used interchangeably, and sometimes they are also confused
with allegory and apologue. What all of these have in common is very smartly captured in the mini-dialogue
in Punch, October 1892, where a child answers her teachers question Whats a Parable? thus: an Earthly story
with a Heavenly meaning. Double-layeredness is a defining feature of all parables and fables as well as allegories.
At one level, there is a simple story that can be a good source of fun and amusement; at another, there is a more
profound meaning that only a thinking reader can get. This is cutting a long story of fable vs. allegory very short.
Philip Sydney has no problem regarding fables as allegories, more or less; Coleridge (1969) as only doubtfully
allegories, or borderline cases of allegories; Lakoff and Turner (1989) find the briefest beast fable to be capable
of creating meaning of great generality (Crisp, 2001:8, 1314, where those arguments are discussed in more
detail).
Telling a fable is, in modern communication terminology (Richmond et al., 1984:88) a behavior alteration
technique (BAT); the fable itself is/contains a behavior alteration message (BAM). Whether the behavior is altered
or not upon reading a fable is beside the present point. Using terminology from Speech Act Theory, the superficial
form and the funny part of the fable are its locution; its moral lesson, its intended message is its illocution; its impact
on the reader is its perlocution how this reader perceives and reacts to the illocution.
2519
That the fable is one of the distressed genres (Stewart, 1991) is tempting, but not quite true, because fables
continue to exercise their influence through various media in todays world. Yet, it may be true that the fable is
revived whenever there is a desire for ideological completeness (Stewart, 1991:16). This may explain the
popularity of fables as educational tools especially with children. It is not quite true, either, that fables, all fables, are
the voice of the oppressed. Pattersons (1991) observation that Aesops Fables are fables of power, not simply
puerile stories with tritely general morals, allowing the politically powerless to speak their truths in an
apparently innocuous way (Patterson, 1991:36), that they are the voice of the slave or laboring class, of the
disenfranchised, the powerless, the uncouth, negroid, or base (Patterson, 1991:87) is hard to apply to all fables.
Fables could be instruments of (unjust) power and tools for silencing protest and resistance. Taking them for granted
could be a token indication of their success in maintaining the status quo.
3.2. Narrative embedding, blending and contextomy
The practice of embedding, the story-within-story, mise-en-abyme, Russian doll, to give a partial list of terms,
dramatizes and makes explicit the motive for storytelling (Brooks, 1984:259), produce[s], in some degree, the
effect of metalepsis (Nelles, 2002:352) the shift from one level of narrative to another and the resulting change from
character/interlocutor to narrator or vice versa (see the relevant diagram below) and renders the motives and
reliability of the storyteller questionable (Genette, 1988). Seen differently, embedding increases the readers
immersion in the story-world and thus increases the illusion of reality (Fludernik, 2003).
Requirements of narrative embedding in the case of fables include, in addition to the change of footing (Goffman,
1981:128, 151; Butler, 1992:38), narrative voice and point of view, establishing a frame story a main story composed
for the purpose of organizing a set of shorter stories. An endless number of circles can exist where a story within a frame
becomes a frame for another story. Consequently a character in a frame can become the narrator of a story. Moreover, the
move from a frame to a story should be warranted. According to Labov and Fanshel (1977), a narrator must be able to
defend a story as relevant and tellable to get and hold the floor and escape censure at its conclusion (Norrick,
2000:105). Telling a story without a currently relevant point constitutes a loss of face for the teller (Polanyi, 1979). In
other words, the Gricean Maxim of Relevance should hold so that the teller may sound cooperative and demonstrate
respect for Lakoffs Dont impose Rule of Politeness. In addition, the teller must be in a position to tell the story. S/He
must have the felicity/sincerity conditions for narrating it. The narrator must have telling rights (Shuman, 1986; BlumKulka, 1993). Reportable events justify an extended narrative turn, that is, occupation of the narrative space, or the shift
from interlocution to narration. Someone who has lived a story, has seen it, or been part of it, has the right to tell it.
The shift from an organizing frame to a tellable story involves a blending of more than one narrative space.
Blending is a central concept in the work of Lakoff and Turner in their development of a cognitive perspective on
storytelling. Their view of proverbs is quite relevant to the analysis of fables. Like proverbs, the generic spaces of
fables are often mapped metaphorically onto specific, individual spaces. Lakoff (1993b) and Lakoff and Turner (1989)
argue that cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor, metonymy, and the interactions of the two are involved in the
interpretations of poems, fables, allegories, and proverbs.
Turner (1996) analyzes the way the mind thinks in a story mode. Talking Animals seem whimsical and exotic, but
they are not. They come from blending in parable, a phenomenon so basic as to be indispensable to our conception of what
it means to have a human character and a human life (Turner, 1996:139). Through narrative imagining, a blended space
of animal traits and human sensibilities is created, a space which is essential to understanding reality. The concept of
metaphorical blending continues to be a major concern in later works by Turner. Turner (2000)
seeks to explain
how we understand a rich domain of literary expression, using a set of kinship metaphors and a number of patterns
metaphoric inference patterns for interpreting those metaphors (Turner, 2000:195). The important question to ask
when interpreting metaphors is which connections to look for and which to ignore (Turner, 2000:185).
The specifically human ability to blend conceptual spaces that should be kept absolutely apart metaphorically,
Turner (2003:3) argues, is an ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit; that is, to activate two conflicting mental
structures (such as snake and person) and to blend them creatively into a new mental structure (such as talking snake
with evil designs) (1, original emphases). When integrating two spaces into a third, some elements of the original
spaces are compressed or deleted (Turner, 2006:17). This capacity, for blending and compressing, or double-scope
integration, is at the heart of human singularity. It places human beings in a different mental galaxy. Were the only
ones (Turner, 2006:26).
2520
In addition to the mapping of elements from two spaces, e.g., two stories, and the selective projection of
certain aspects of both at the expense of others, double-scope stories involve emergent structures the very
blending of elements from two different spaces, the filling in of parts in the new blend and the independent
development thereof according to its own principles (Turner, 2003:11). The blended story has emergent structure
of its own (Turner, 2003:13).
Herman (2006) provides an additional explanation for the pervasiveness of embedding and blending, an
explanation which takes framed narratives to be intelligent systems which stage and facilitate the process of
shared thinking about past events and about ones own and other minds. Such systems, Herman (2006:357)
continues, propagate experiential frames . . . across time and space. A story where there is no embedding, which is
hard to find, cannot reach as far in time and space. Narrative embedding, Herman concludes, enhances the overall
power of the knowledge-generating system to which it lends structure. This is partly why embedding and blending
are so pervasive from Homer and Apuleius to Andre Gide and A.S. Byatt, from practitioners of ancient epics to
producers of ludic postmodern texts, from film-makers and graphic novelists to creators of instructional CDs and
hypertext fictions (Herman, 2006:358).
It should be remembered here that blending is a human act, which means, among other things, that it is ideologically
motivated to serve certain communication purposes. Which stories are blended with which reveal a lot about the
discursive communicative purposes of the blend. Moreover, the stories in the blend and the blend itself have their own
textual agency (Cooren, 2008) the capacity to produce speech acts or, more broadly, discursive acts (Cooren,
2008:11). We should not hesitate to take into account that we live in a world full of various agencies and that the
structuring of this world is only possible through the active contribution of the discursive and physical artifacts that
humans produce (Cooren, 2008:12). We tell stories and blend them, and stories do things, e.g., move, persuade,
inform, warn, ridicule, etc., and in so doing they tell us as well.
Blending does perform a persuasive function. No matter what its ultimate goals might be or whether or not its
regarded as manipulation (see below), persuasion can be performed in a number of ways, in addition to the initial
choice of blended spaces and the selective projection of some of their elements, for example, through contextomy
(McGlone, 2005). Contextomy refers to the excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that
distorts the sources intentions. It can prompt audiences to form a false impression of the source and can
contaminate subsequent interpretation when the quote is restored to its original context (McGlone, 2005:330). This
definition needs to be expanded to include instances of omission and commission in the reporting of a (news)story,
unwarranted generalization of specific cases and the inattention to the socio-historical and political circumstances of
the reported story or news.
3.3. Manipulation and legitimation
Manipulation, van Dijk (2006) argues, is a form of social power abuse, cognitive mind control and
discursive interaction. Socially, it is an illegitimate domination confirming social inequality. Cognitively, it
involves the interference with processes of understanding, the formation of biased mental models and social
representations such as knowledge and ideologies. Discursively, it involves the usual forms and formats of
ideological discourse, such as emphasizing Our good things, and emphasizing Their bad things (van Dijk, 2006:359)
van Dijks (1998) ideological square (de/emphasize good/bad things of Us/Them). Manipulation in these senses,
van Dijk (2006) argues, should be differentiated from what he describes as legitimate mind control, such as in
persuasion and providing information (van Dijk, 2006:359). This kind of manipulation is in the best interest of the
dominated group, which can only be determined by referring to the context of manipulation (van Dijk, 2006:361).
Whether manipulation is in the interest of the manipulator, the manipulated, or some other party is a question that can
be answered only within a context, and the answer can always be contested.
The lines between manipulation and legitimate mind control are very difficult to draw or identify. In fact,
suggesting that something is in the best interest of someone may itself be an antecedent to manipulating him/her. In
other words, legitimating, or representing something as legitimate, can be, and it often is, an effective manipulative
strategy. As already indicated, legitimation itself is a complex process that can be achieved through a variety of ways,
discussed by van Leeuwen (2007) and applied to the fable in Mazid (2007; see above). In addition to telling stories
where good behavior is rewarded, legitimation can be achieved through citing an authority, making moral
evaluations and representing something as rational.
2521
3.4. Analyzing a fable

A fable, being a narrative text, may be analyzed following the model established by Labov (1972) and summarized in
Wennerstrom (2001:11681187), wherefrom the definitions of the following components of a narrative are taken, to wit,
Abstract: An initial link from previous discourse into the story; a summary of the narrative about to be told;
Orientation: The setting and/or background for the narrative; who was there, when and where did the events take place;
what were the circumstances?; Complicating actions: The events of the narratives plot; what actually happened?;
Resolution: The result or outcome of the narrative; the ending; Evaluation subjective expressions (Jahn,
2005:NL4): The tellers own assessment of the narrative events. Why is it worth telling?; Coda: A final link from the
narrative back to the present interaction. (The coda is not the same as the moral of the fable, although they may coincide.
The moral is not simply an individual subjective evaluation, either, although it may be made up of a number of
evaluations. The moral is the final say of the narrative and the advice based thereon. Subjective evaluations are
metadiscursive affective or attitudinal comments by the narrator expressing his/her stance and/or emotions.)
Labovs model has proven very helpful in analyzing many narrative subgenres and discourse fragments, especially
with a self-contained, fairly stable genre such as the fable. (See, for example, Mazid, 2006, for an application of the
model in analyzing a story in an email.) The generic elements of exposition/orientation, rising action/complicating
actions and falling action/resolution (cf. Boyce, 2004, where a fable closes with a moral lesson) are very appealing and
readily applicable, an easy beginning-middle-end rubric, to an infinite number of human narratives. Labovs addition
of Abstract, Coda and Evaluation is helpful in analyzing narrative embedding and blending because they indicate
which spaces, which parts of the narrative, are blended with which, why and where the blending starts and where it
ends, and the authorial evaluative and organizational interventions in the narrative.
Seguins (2001) narrative algorithm is a useful complement to Labovs model. The algorithm is a syntagmatic
dimension of the story. Its basic units are: manipulation + competence + performance + recognition. Manipulation in
Seguins algorithm refers to tempting someone to get something. This is a narrowing down of the sense of the term as used
by van Dijk (2006). Whether the person can get this something or not is an outcome of his/her competence. The main test
is the actual performance of the tempted subject. Finally, recognition has to do with the assessment of the subjects
performance, by him/herself or by his/her seducer, the sender (Seguin, 2001:202203, substantially simplified).
4. Fable from Kalila and Dimna
The remaining part of the article examines the sample fable in its fictional and cultural contexts the context of Ibn
Al-Muqaffa and his objectives and the context of the different layers and frames surrounding the fable and explains
how the authors tools contribute to the realization of his objectives and how a critical rereading of the various aspects
of the fable can contribute to uncovering its ideologies, its metaphorical conceptualizations of learning a foreign
language and its view of what it involves to attempt something new, and its (ambivalent) support of power in the
context where it was (re)produced.
4.1. Context and purpose(s)
Ibn Al-Muqaffa, formerly a Zoroastrian, is an important figure in the second great period of Arabic literature, which
lasted from the mid-eighth to the thirteenth centuries AD, a period characterized by the development of new genres and
of very sophisticated critical concepts. He was executed on the orders of Al-Mansur (712775) the Abbasid Caliph, for
heresy, specifically attempting to import Zoroastrian ideas into Islam (Wikipedia; El-Najjar, 1995; http://
en.allexperts.com). Ibn Al-Muqaffa remains one of the most controversial figures in Arab and Muslim literature
whether or not he really embraced Islam, why he was executed, his attitude toward religion and politics, in addition to
questions regarding his authorship or adaptation of Kalila and Dimna. He is said to have suggested that the cleric
must submit to the prince, started a secularist tradition, criticized religious texts on many accounts and defended
reason against revelation (Meddeb, 2006). Whether these contextual fact(or)s have an impact on the text at hand is a
question this paper attempts to answer below, at least partially.
Ibn Al-Muqaffas purpose in adapting the famous fables remains controversial as well, regardless of his statement
in the introduction to his book. Long before the rise of systematic philosophical thought . . . people have been making
up stories in order to convey what they think about how we ought to live (Singer and Singer, 2005:x). The original
2522
fables were made up by Baydapa to help the King run his Kingdom. Ibn Al-Muqaffas goal, Wacks (2003) argues,
was not so much to promote prose narrative as a literary genre, as it was to use narrative as a vehicle to display highly
polished rhetorical style (Wacks, 2003:181). Ibn Al-Muqaffas adaptation, however, was instrumental in opening
avenues of innovation in Arabic prose narrative by introducing episodic narrative (Wacks, 2003:182).
To agree with Wacks is to simply deny Ibn Al-Muqaffa any communicative goals or ideological preoccupations
beyond a narcissist show of rhetorical ability. In his introduction to the fables, he warns his readers of stopping at the
fun part of the fables and states that the collection of fables has four objectives: to provide entertainment for the young
so that they may be later tempted to learn, to provide amusement and delight for the ruling elite, through stories of
animals and birds faced with dilemmas and required to take important decisions, and to ensure continuity deriving
from the combination of the humorous and the serious a combination that is likely to preserve the attraction of the
book through the ages. (For a broadly cognitive explanation of how this objective may be attained through narrative
embedding, see Herman, 2006, and below.) The author does not spell out the fourth objective which he says concerns
only Philosophers (electronic version, www.alwaraq.com, p. 19).
The thrust of Ibn Al-Muqaffas exposition of his objectives is that the fables are a blend of dulce and utile sweet
and useful, which is Horaces condition for a good literary work. In more up-to-date words, the fables are meant to
provide their readers with infotainment information and entertainment, or knowledge and pleasure. The pleasure
part constitutes the appeal and attractiveness which a piece of work attaches to the ideas, the knowledge or
information, which it seeks to convey. Thus, the pleasure part, as already suggested in Ibn Al-Muqaffas introduction,
is not gratuitous; it is part of the very rhetoric, persuasiveness and intended influence of the work. Not every reader
moves right away from the pleasure to the knowledge, however. It takes some thinking to get the point or points of a
text which, in the case of fables, is/are embedded in its symbols behind animal guises.
4.2. Fable of the Crow and the Partridge
It is not surprising that the fable of the Crow and the Partridge is quoted a euphemism for so many things done
with the fable, as explained below in a discussion of, for example, globalization in contemporary Arab-Islamic
culture. The fable is relatively short, epigrammatic and memorable. Other appeals of this fable can be found in what it
says and does.
4.2.1. Summary
King Dabshalim asks Bidpai (Baydapa) the Philosopher to relate a parable about someone who abandons his craft
which suits him and which he is qualified for to another that he cannot attain, so he ends up perplexed and confused
between the two. The Philosopher relates the story of a hermit who is visited by someone. The hermit speaks Hebrew,
in addition to his mother language and lives in a prosperous region where good quality palm trees are grown. The guest
is obviously fascinated by both, the delicious palm-dates and Hebrew language. He asks the hermit to help him take
some of the palm trees back home and learn Hebrew. The hermit, instead of fulfilling his guests wishes, argues that the
trees may not transplant to the guests land and downplays their potential value and benefit for the guest. He further
argues that learning Hebrew may not be an easy task. Then, he relates a story about a crow and a partridge: It was
related that a crow saw a partridge walking, skipping and hopping. He liked her walk and wanted to learn it. He started
training himself on this manner of walking but could never master it. He gave up and wanted to get back to his normal
manner of walking, only to walk in a confused, clumsy manner which became the ugliest of all manners of walking
amongst birds. I only related this fable to you, the hermit continued, when I found that you abandoned your own
language, which you had been used to, and wanted to embrace Hebrew, which does not become you and which I feared
you could never master. You may as well forget your own language and get back to your folks with the most terrible,
perplexed language of all. The hermit then reported, It was said that it is ignorant of someone to try things that do
not befit him, that are not the kind of stuff he can do and that his parents and grandparents have not trained him
thereon. (For a complete translation of the fable, see Mazid, 2007.)
4.2.2. Tools
To realize the goals of the fables, as outlined by the author in his introduction, requires the effective use of some
relevant tools. The most effective tools of the fable are the genre itself and the technique of narrative embedding and
blending. Being itself metaphorical, blending will have its own conceptual-metaphorical outcomes.
2523
4.2.2.1. Genre. The very use of the fable genre can be, and often is, ideological and elitist. It is, at least in
the present case. The fable allows a writer to voice political statements and comments that can otherwise be banned.
The discussion of the contexts of the fable below and the context where Ibn Al-Muqaffa himself wrote his fables may
explain this political aspect of the narrative genre. In his introduction to the fables, Ibn Al-Muqaffa seems to
presuppose a tripartite division of his readership into the careless young, the thinking grown-ups and the refined
Philosophers, an ageist, elitist division, obviously. A fable can make sense, in different ways, to all of these.
There is also the authors/translators desire that the attraction of his book may be preserved through the ages. The
fable genre is likely to help him fulfill this desire by virtue of being capable of multiple readings, interpretations,
translations, adaptations and rewritings in different contexts and by different readers in different cultures. It provides
an author with the chance to give an extra dimension, or dimensions to his/her work and thus to make a deeper and
more lasting impression on the minds of readers (Young, 1982:20). Whether this impression is positive or negative,
beneficial or not, is another story.
4.2.2.2. Narrative embedding and blending. In Kalila wa Dimna, the Philosopher Baydapa relates to King
Dabshalim the tale of the Lion, the bull, and the two jackals, Kalila and Dimna. The frame of the work is meant to elicit
further tales to be narrated by the animal characters themselves. Just as Baydapa acts as counselor to his King, Kalila
and Dimna act as counselors to their King, the lion (Wacks, 2003). The frame story of the King and the Philosopher is
the central line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them. The frame
suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue (Gamson and Modigliani, 1987:143). Frames are
never neutral. By defining what the essential issue is and suggesting how to think about it, frames imply what, if
anything, should be done (Berinsky and Kinder, 2006:17).
The very creation of the frame is never unmotivated. There is no reason to believe it is not simply fictional. Western
studies of the grand book of fables suffer from lack of a definitive text of the Arabic version, still more from the total
loss of the Pehlevi from which the Arabic is translated (Brown, 1922:215). This said, the PhilosopherKing frame
may be seen as an invention by the original author of the fable carried over, recreated or modified by Ibn Al-Muqaffa,
very similar to other frames such as the pilgrims turn-taking in Canterbury Tales and the Shahryar and Scheherazade
frame story in the Arabian Nights.
All the chapters in the fable book are motivated or triggered by requests made by the King, which explains why
there is a frame story. The grand frame contains the chapters and the chapters unfold into stories and the stories into
more stories and so on. This is the case in the chapter of the hermit and his guest and the embedded fable of the Crow
and the Partridge. The following diagram shows the three main narrative levels in the fable:
Diagram 1. Narrative levels in the fable, adapted from Herman (2006:363).
2524
The first, extra-, or metadiegetic, level is the unifying frame of the fables and the stories. The move from this level
to the second the diegetic raises questions regarding the tellability of the story at the latter level. The Kings request
legitimates the telling of the story of the hermit and his guest. That this particular story is told is the Philosophers
decision, warranted by his knowledge. The Kings request cannot be rejected or ignored, given the status of the person
making it. The request here is direct:
qaala dabshaliimu l malik li baidaba l failasuuf qad sami C
tu haatha l maual fa Drib li mauala llathii yada Cu
sunC ahu llathii yaliiqu bihi wa yushaakiluhu wa yaTlubu ghayrahu flaa yudrikuhu faybqaa ayraana
mutraddida
King Dabshalim said to Baydapa the Philosopher, I have heard that fable/parable; now, tell me another about
someone who abandons his craft which becomes him and which he becomes to another that he cannot attain, so
he ends up perplexed and confused between the two).
Incidentally, the request also functions as an abstract, in Labovs (1972) terminology. In fact, it determines the kind of
ending the story to be told should reach. It also builds a connection to the immediate context of the listener
(Fujii, 2007:189). Even this rudimentary performative frame, Wacks (2003:185) argues, reproduces some of the
interaction between storyteller and audience characteristic of a storytelling event, an interaction which is obviously
power-marked.
Another shift occurs from the second to the third narrative level the hypodiegetic, from the story of the
hermit and his guest to the fable of the Crow and the Partridge. Unlike the previous shift, this one is speakerinitiated:
faqaala n-naasiku li Dayfihi maa akhlaqaka an taqa C
a mimmaa tarakta min kalaamika wa takallafta min
kalaami l Cibraanyyah fi miuli maa waqa Ca fiih il ghuraab fa qaala Dayf wa kayfa kaana thaalik
So, the hermit said to his guest, When you give up your mother tongue and force yourself to speak
Hebrew, you are very likely to have the same destiny that the crow had. The [curious] guest asked, And how
was that?
This pre-sequence functions as a second Abstract. Like the first, it represents the fable to come as storyable and
tellable (Shuman, 1986:54) and facilitates the change of footing the move from an intermediate, diegetic to an
internal, hypodigetic layer in the narrative. The two shifts contribute to a generally episodic text, which is
characteristic of performed narratives (Wacks, 2003:183). The manufactured storyability of the story and then the
fable within the frame conversation between Baydapa and Dabshalim makes both fable and story distractive and
explanatory rather than obstructive (Genette, 1988).
What is going on here is not simply moving from one narrative layer to another; the movements involve an intricate
blending of at least three narrative spaces those of the King and the Philosopher, the hermit and his guest and
the Crow and the Partridge. A more detailed analysis of the fable within its frames may explain how the blendings are
achieved and what they do.
4.2.3. Further analysis
This section is a more detailed analysis of the three layers of the narrative text. The analysis, which builds upon the
communication contexts and narrative embedding discussed above, combines traditional categories of a story, the
Labovian model and some categories from Seguins (2001) narrative algorithm.
4.2.3.1. Narrative components, shifts and layers. This is an analysis of the components of the frame, the story and
the fable and the transitions from one layer to another in the narrative blend.
A. Baydapa and the King: Requesting Narrative
Every chapter starts with a request by the King to which the Philosopher can only respond with a story. The
Kings request is both an Abstract, as already stated above, and a definition of the theme of the upcoming story. Here is the
story:
2525
B. Narrative: za C
amuu annahu kaana bi arD il karkhi naasikun C
aabidun mujtahid Once upon a time [Lit.
They claimed], there was in Kharkh [part of what is now Iraq] a devout, diligent hermit. These are the different
components of the hermit and the guest story:
1. Exposition/orientation: Characters (the hermit and the guest); Setting (the hermits home, somewhere in todays
Baghdad). No indicators of time.
2. Complication/rising action: The guest, tasting the dates, hearing the hermit speak Hebrew, is twice tempted. This is
manipulation in Seguins (2001) narrative algorithm.
3. Complication/conflict: The guests desires/requests against the hermits refusals)
4. Falling action to resolution: Argumentation and narration as way-outs. These are not resolutions of the conflict. The
conflict is delayed to the next layer of the narrative. The hermits argument against transplanting date-palms: You
will find no comfort in this; it will be much of a burden on you. The palm trees may not transplant well in your land.
Moreover, you have so many types of trees and plants there. Why should you want to take ours home when they
are not very palatable and not so good for the body? (ma C
a wakhaamatihi wa qillati muwaafaqatihi lil jasad) Then,
the hermit said, It is not wise of someone to ask for what is not his. You are fortunate and happy if you comfort
yourself with what you already have and give up whatever you do not (wa innaka la sa C
iidu l jaddi ithaa qana
Cta bil-lathii tajiduhu wa zahidta fi maa la tajid). The argument is couched in a number of evaluations, in the
Labovian sense, e.g., wise ( akiiman), fortunate and happy, and jeopardized by an interesting contradiction
between stating that the dates are not palatable or good for the body and offering the guest some of those dates.
However, the moral be happy with what you have remains unquestioned by the guest. To resolve the foreign
language learning problem, the hermit narrates the fable the Crow and the Partridge, guest story (see above), whose
Abstract is already given at the end of the hermitguest layer. This narrative turn, as already indicated, is speakerinitiated. It starts the same way the story above does with the Arabic za Camuu (Lit. They claimed; It was
claimed), a narrative equivalent of the English Once upon a time. In starting the story and the fable, the
Philosopher and the hermit, respectively, deflect narrative responsibility and refuse to be held accountable for the
content of either. The fable of the Crow and the Partridge starts here.
a. Exposition: Characters (the crow and the partridge); Setting (no indicators of time or place).
b. Complication/rising action: The crow is tempted by the partridges gait.
c. Complication/conflict: Desire vs. inability to learn the partridges gait; competence vs. performance in Seguins
(2001) sense. There is also the inevitable tension between first and the second or foreign language.
d. Falling action to resolution: The crow fails to learn the partridges walk and cannot get back to its own He
gave up and wanted to get back to his normal manner of walking, only to walk in a confused, clumsy manner
which became the ugliest of all manners of walking amongst birds wa aysa minhaa wa araada an ya C
uuda
ila mishyatihi illati kaana Calayhaa fa ithaa huwa qad ikhtalaTa wa takhalla Ca fi mishyatihi wa Saara aqba a
TTayri mashya a resolution which is carried back by analogy and through blending to the outer frame of the
hermit and his guest. Based on the fable, the hermit teaches the guest the following moral lesson:
5. Moral: Be happy with what you are or have a repetition of the moral above It was said that it is ignorant of
someone to try things that do not befit him, that are not the kind of stuff he can do and that his parents and
grandparents have not trained him thereon, nor have they been associated therewith/nor has it been typical of them
( fa innahu qad qiila innahu yu C
addu jaahilan man takallafa min al umuuri maa la yushaakiluhu wa laysa min
Camalihi wa lam yu ddibhu Calayhi aabaa uhu wa ajdaaduhu min qabl wa la yu Crafuuna bih). It is now the
Philosophers turn to extract wisdom and advice for the King out of the story and the fable; that is, to carry over the
resolution from the fable to the story and finally to the outmost frame of the narrative:
C. Coda: (1) from the crow fable to the hermit story: I only related this fable to you, the hermit continued, when I
found that you abandoned your own language, which you had been used to, and wanted to embrace Hebrew
(wa innama Darabtu laka hatha l mauala lima ra aytu min annaka tarakta lisaanak allathii Tubi Cta Calayhi wa
aqbalta C
ala lisaani il Cibraaniyyah); (2) from the hermit story to the KingPhilosopher frame: The Philosopher then
said to the King, Rulers, in being careless about their subjects on this and other issues, are to blame since they manage
things more wrongly [than the hermit]. For, there is difficulty and painstaking in peoples mobility from one state or
condition to another. And things go gradually up till they culminate in the great danger of revolting against the King
(Qumma qaala l failasuufu lil malik fa l wulaatu fi qillati ta Cahhudihim li r-ra C
iyyati fi hatha wa ashbaahihi
2526
alwamu wa aswa u tadbiiran li anna tanaqqula n-naasi min baCDi l manaazili ila baCD fiihi SuCuubatun wa
mashaqqatun shadiidah uumma inna l ashyaa a fi thaalika tajri C
ala manaazila atta tantahiya ila l khaTari jjasiimi min muDDadati l maliki fi mulkih). A pronominal shift occurs when the fable text goes back to the frame
interaction: first and second person pronouns I and you between the hermit and the guest are replaced with
third person pronouns that refer to kings and their subjects, which is consistent with the shifting power-relations
from hermitguest to PhilosopherKing. The shift is also effective in producing generalized statements and contextindependent conclusions about ruling and the dangers of letting the ruled loose. The shift renders the Philosophers
advice to the King more polite and less challenging than that of the hermit to the guest.
The function of the coda at the end of the text above is to establish the relevance of the story and the fable to the
grand frame. The story and the fable are the Philosophers response to the Kings request. Whether the King perceives
the advice as sound or not depends on his agenda and his governance orientation totalitarian, dictatorial or
democratic. Whether it is sound or not from the point of view of the audience depends on their own contexts and
ideologies.
The same kind of argument can be applied to the moral at the end of the fable. We have no clue as to the reaction of
the guest consent, resentment, rejection, counter-argument, or something else. This reaction, as well as the reaction
of the readers of the fable will inevitably be an outcome of their ideologies and experiences. The experiential frame
(Herman, 2006) the fable seeks to propagate may not transplant easily from one culture to another. It is up to the
readers of the fable to recognize and/or accept the metaphors and the arguments therein and the selective blending
which it part is of.
4.2.3.2. Dyads, grammar and metaphors. The PhilosopherKing frame interaction unfolds into a story which
unfolds into a fable. In realizing the various moves outlined above, the text comprises three parallel dyads: the King
and the Philosopher where the story is initiated, the hermit and the guest where the fable is initiated and the crow and
the partridge where the chapter comes to a closure the coda which links the fable and the story to the frame. More or
less the same message is communicated at the narrative levels of the fable and the story. The link that goes back to the
King-Baydapa frame interaction seems to communicate more or less the same moral, albeit from a different vantagepoint. Whereas the crow is instructed not to try to emulate the partridge and the guest not to try to emulate the hermit, a
King is instructed not to give his subjects the chance to change or develop, because they may end up revolting against
him. This is where the whole chapter the frame, the story and the fable links with what we know about the author/
translator of Kalila and Dimna his argument that the cleric should submit to the prince (see above): that the power of
knowledge/wisdom should surrender to the knowledge/wisdom of power.
A functional grammar of the narrative layers above would reveal aspects of their textual agencies. In this grammar,
the Kings request is a Theme/Subject and the story of the hermit and his guest is its Rheme/Predicate; the story being
also the Theme for the fable to come. The three layers are predominated by Verbal Processes: I have heard, tell
me, the hermit said, It was related, It has been said. When the text arrives at the guest wanting to learn a new
language, Mental Processes indicating the crows admiration of the partridges gait aC
jabathu (he liked it) and
TamiC a an yataC allamaha (he desired to learn it) and his giving up ayisa minha (he gave it up) and
Material Processes describing the crow trying to learn a new gait or walk raDa C
ala thaalika nafsahu (he trained
himself thereon) and lam yaqdir Cala i kaamiha (He could not master it) show up in the narrative.
The Verbal Processes in the narrative perform two major functions, in addition to the simple act of telling:
establishing the authority of the Philosopher and the hermit and at the same time clouding responsibility for the
truth-value of the content of the story as well as the fable and the statements based thereon. The Arabic metadiscursive
expressions Darabtu laka hatha l mauala (I told you this parable) and iDrib lii maualan (Tell me a parable)
are very authoritative by virtue of their scriptural origins. The passives qiila (It has been said) and yuCaddu
(is considered) combine with the agentless narrational verb zaCamuu (They have claimed) in blurring the
boundaries between citation and emotion and clouding responsibility for the cited anecdotes and opinions.
The process relating to learning a second language raaDa (trained trans., 3rd person, sing. masc.), where the
Arabic word riyaaDah (sports, athletics) derives from underlines the behaviorist habit-formation, muscletraining characterization of (second/foreign) language learning. Drills, structured exercises and repetition are crucial
to moving from a first to a second or foreign language. Midway between the two, there is a stage commonly known as
interlanguage an emerging linguistic system of a learner of a second language who has not become fully proficient
yet but is only approximating the target language: preserving some features of his/her first language. An interlanguage
2527
can fossilize at any of its developmental stages (Richards, 1974:4346). This is obviously the case with the crow in the
fable, unable to get back to its normal walk and yet unable to master a new one the partridges.
This is one metaphor in the fable where learning a foreign language is a kind of muscle-training. Other metaphors
result from the blending of three narrative spaces in one text. The learning of a foreign language (by the guest) is more
broadly similar to learning to walk (by the crow). It is also like transplanting palm-trees from one land (the hermits) to
another (the guests). Blending also results in the metaphor of the guest as a crow and the hermit as a partridge, with the
latter in both cases being in the superior position of owning and knowing things the former admires but cannot obtain.
As the fable comes to a closure, the KingPhilosopher frame is reactivated in the coda and the interaction between the
two is capable of being perceived metaphorically. The King seeks advice and knowledge which the Philosopher has,
which is very similar to wanting to transplant the palm-trees, to speak a different language and to walk in a different
way. Those metaphors do not belong to any of the three narrative spaces; they result from their being blended into a
new space.
The basic model of blending developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) is made up of four circles (Diagram 2).
The four circles represent mental spaces. Mental spaces, according to Fauconnier and Turner (2002:40), are small
conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action, a notion which is
more context-dependent and dynamic than conceptual metaphor theorys notion of domains (Tendahl and Gibbs,
2008:1843). Mental spaces are often signaled by words. They can be signaled by other signs as well (see Mazid, 2008,
for a discussion of signaling and blending of mental spaces in political cartoon texts which employ both word and
image for their message and effect).
Diagram 2. Fauconnier and Turners (2002:46) model of conceptual integration.
The upper circle in the model is the Generic Space, which permits the mapping of one mental space unto
another, while the two circles facing horizontally and mediating the Generic Space and the Blend represent the
two inputs, the target and the source, the tenor and the vehicle, in earlier metaphor theories. The mappings
between the two inputs, spaces, or domains, are indicated by two solid lines, The dotted lines indicate relations
between the Generic Space and the two inputs and also the formation of a Blend out of the two inputs, a process
which involves composition, completion, and elaboration (Tendahl and Gibbs, 2008, for an explanation of these
terms and a discussion of how blending works). The square in the Blend in the lower circle represents an emergent
structure.
The four metaphors identified above can be explained following this conceptual integration model. As shown in
Diagram 3 below, Input I1 is occupied by learning a new or foreign language and the hermitguest dyad. Learning a
new language is mapped onto the mental spaces of learning to walk, muscle-training and (trans)planting a tree. The
hermitguest dyad is mapped unto the partridge-crow space (Input I2). The mappings are warranted by the Generic
Spaces where the two inputs belong. Learning a new language is in part a physical-cognitive activity, it involves
movement of some organs of the body and it can be cultivated, rooted and watered. The hermitguest mapping is
warranted by an overall space of creation and creatures, which, though diverse, share a lot.
2528
Diagram 3. Metaphors of learning a foreign language in the fable.
The spaces that result from those blendings are emergent structures rare moments when and where the Buddhist
monk meets himself, moving up and moving down the mountain (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998). Those metaphorical
moments are not so rare, however, because the spaces that are blended in the fable are also blended elsewhere in many
languages and cultures and contexts that talking is like walking, that learning to talk is like learning to walk, that both
involve moving and stumbling, that learning a new language is like developing a habit or training a muscle, at least
from a Behaviorist perspective on language, that words are like trees, that they can grow and wither, prosper and fruit,
and that humans are like birds, at least in their ambitious desire to fly and reach higher.
None of the components of Input I1 is identical with, or the same as, its counterpart in Input I2. Some aspects of the
two inputs are selectively projected and mapped unto each other, e.g., some aspects of learning to talk are mapped unto
some aspects of learning to walk. Selective projection, an important part of blending in Fauconnier and Turners (1998,
2002) Conceptual Integration Networks (CITs), can be ignored or clouded for ideological purposes, as can be seen in
the fable, so that talking and walking, learning a language and training muscles, learning a language and transplanting
a tree, humans and birds are conflated and represented as identical. They are NOT.
The Philosopher and the hermit, the King and the guest, are not identical, either. Yet, blending also occurs, at least
partially, between the two layers which these duos occupy. Both the hermit and the Philosopher are endowed with the
power of knowledge and the authority of religion and wisdom, as already suggested. Both the guest and the King are in
need. It is this need, in addition to the endowments of the hermit and the Philosopher, that establishes the authority of
the thinking-speaking narrators vis-a`-vis their requesting-listening companions. The need and the variation in the
amount of knowledge and wisdom also signal a number of analogies between the three layers of narrative the crow to
the partridge is the guest to the hermit (as indicated by the hermit); the guest to the hermit is the King to the
Philosopher; the King to the Philosopher is the crow to the partridge (for more on how an outer layer blends into an
inner one in the fables, see Ghazoul, 1983 and Naithani, 2004).
Whether these duos blend as easily into modern and contemporary frames and contexts is questionable, to say
the least. However, unwarranted analogies between the fable, on the one hand, and modern and contemporary
(Arab-Islamic) culture and thought, on the other, continue to be made.
4.2.4. Communication contexts and contextomy
In the context of Arabs/Muslims reaction to the anti-Islamic Danish caricatures that caused a lot of media and
popular hype during 2006 and the subsequent boycott of Danish products by Arab and Muslim countries, an online
article (http://islameiat.com/entsar/mqal194.htm) describes an Arab identifying with Western culture as a sheep that
departs from its flock to join a pack of wolves and ends up awkwardly hanging in-between not belonging to either, just
like the crow in the fable from Kalila and Dimna. Nothing is said about the context of the sheep or the crow. The stories
are quoted out of context and embedded or nested in the article, presupposing that they really happened somewhere.
2529
Contextomy, or quoting out of context, is also committed in an article that intertextually relates to the fable and
addresses the Issue of Identity (2006, http://www.vbnaajm.naajm.com/showthread.php?p=319047). A new narrative is
created which departs from the original story in Kalila and Dimna: the gait of the partridge is further beautified to
resemble the walk of a bride in her wedding procession and many explanations are provided for the failure of the crow.
New metaphors are generated from the story: your walk is like your clothes; you cannot put on someone elses clothes.
The metaphor is grounded in contemporary controversies on the Muslim female dress, especially the hijaab (veil).
With contextomy comes a reification of the stories in the grand book of fables as timeless truths that teach us how
to lead a happy life (e.g., Kubaani, 2005). The stories and fables are cited, decontextualized from their original speech
events and recontextualized in new ones, to constitute their evidentiary and epistemological fields (Matoesian, 2000),
in support of many arguments, especially when it comes to language and language learning issues, e.g., Arabization, or
using Arabic rather than French as a language of education in Algeria (Argun, 2002) and the globalization of Arab
mass media (Al-Qassim, 2006).
In appropriating the fable to modern contexts, unwarranted leaps and analogies, e.g., learning to walk is like learning a
language, proliferate and the fables field of presence (Foucault, 1972; cited in Scheffer, 2007:34) continues to
expand and utterances become statements: something that might have been carelessly uttered at one period of time
becomes a binding version in due course; every communication, even the unintended presentation that contributes to
the proceeding, counts as information that opens, thickens and excludes opportunities that define the acting persons and
their relevant history and reduces their options to decide (Luhmann, 1989; cited in Scheffer, 2007:23).
Leaps and analogies with a minimal, if any, attention to context do occur at as well as between the three layers of
narrative in Ibn Al-Muqaffas text itself. As already indicated above, the listener-triggered story of the hermit and his
guest is Baydapas response to the Kings request and the fable of the Crow and the Partridge is the hermits tool for
silencing his guest and subduing his ambitions. There is enough context about the King and Baydapa who occupy the
frame of the narrative, but there is very little context about the hermit and the guest and even less context about the
crow and the partridge. The text tells us that the hermit lived in Karkh, on the west bank of the Tigris River, which is
one of the two districts that make up todays Baghdad, that he spoke Hebrew as a second language and that he offered
his guest some delicious palm-dates. Not every element of each space shows up in the ultimate blend. We do not know,
for example, which first language the hermit or the guest spoke, whether or not the guest was convinced and how other
birds reacted to the crows unsuccessful attempt at learning a new walk and precisely why it was unsuccessful. Too
much context and a lot of details may not permit a story to blend easily with another, may saddle a story so that it
cannot move easily from one space to another. They may not permit an author to realize the communicative purpose(s)
of telling the story. This is perhaps why the fable continues to travel from one communicative space to another with
very little, if any, background about its original context.
4.2.5. Power, politics and knowledge
One aspect of the fables that has been regrettably under-researched is the power-relationships involved in their texts as
well as their contexts. The KingPhilosopher relationship is the frame of the fables. Political authority vis-a`-vis the power
of knowledge, or the wisdom of power vs. the power of wisdom, so to speak, is the framework within which the fables are
told. It is reenacted in the hermitguest relationship one has knowledge and delicious palm-dates, in addition to at least
one foreign language; the other is in the inferior position of a person who lacks all of these. Scientia potentia est is
Bacons maxim meaning Knowledge is power. The opposite is often more true, at least from a critical discourse
analysis perspective, that power is knowledge, in the sense that power decides which knowledge is produced in a given
social setting and gets to count as knowledge in discourse and decision making (cf. Flyvbjerg, 1998). In the fable, the
hermits knowledge is manipulated to produce a desired communicative effect on his guest.
There is no indication in the text above that NOT learning Hebrew is in the interest of the guest. There is no
evidence, except the hermits argument, that transplanting the palm-trees would not be beneficial to the guest. The
verbal processes and reporting verbs preceding and following the fable render the very fable and the statements based
thereon questionable. Yet, when created and presented by a hermit, they remain unquestioned.
The hermits theological and epistemic power manifests itself in his narrative dominance, or occupation of
discursive or verbal space (Dorriots and Johansson, 1999). The very act of telling a story is power, at least in this
context. Unquestioned, the events in the story appear as if they really happened, somewhere, sometime. Although
narrating does not show up in the taxonomies of speech acts provided by Austin (1962) and Searle (1976), it can go
under Austins class of expositives, Searles class of representatives and Bach and Harnishs (1979) class of constatives.
2530
Once told, and while they are told, stories come to possess textual agencies of their own. The hermit, by virtue of being
more powerful and as a result of dominating the narrative, is in a position to determine what is good and what is not for the
guest. The hermits affective compelling arguments (cf. Sheafer, 2007:21), based on the effect of negative issue
attributes, i.e., the negative description of the palm-dates (text-internal evaluation), and on narration where wrong action
is punished at the end of the fable (text-external evaluation), are his means of resetting the guests agenda, so to speak, so
that he may give up the two wishes. The fable tells the guest not to try to learn a language that is not his or to attempt
transplanting palm-tees where they do not belong. The two aspirations are negatively represented as harmful or
unattainable. Giving up on both is positively represented as wise and rational.
The theological/epistemic power of the hermit translates into a communicative power in other ways: there is no
mutual exchange of relevant information; there is very little responsiveness on the part of the hermit as both
requests of the guest are not satisfied; there is no indication of a final mutual commitment which contains at least
the hope that the relevant problem will find a solution, and there is no indication that the result of the dialogue is
conformed to in action (Dorriots and Johansson, 1999:205).
The hermits power is also established and exercised in the unwarranted leaps from one domain to another, the
blending of one space into another and the metaphors that result from this. No counterargument is made and the
hermits conclusion is left unquestioned. The experts (hermits) account which is insensitive to local realities does
not pay any attention to the potential for public and stakeholder participation in the drafting, implementation, and
revision of scientific conclusions and expert knowledge products (Young and Matthews, 2007:128). Today, critical
studies examine the tendency of the media to frame scientific claims in exaggerated or moralistic terms, particularly
when claims are contested or controversial (Young and Matthews, 2007:132). In the context of the fable, the hermit is
his own medium the medium is the sender, so to speak and science and knowledge are easily confusable with belief,
opinion and attitude; so moral judgments and conclusive, non-tentative statements are quite frequent and predictable.
Where does the hermits power come from? His power derives from his being a hermit, an ascetic, devoted to
worship and knowledge. In the context of the Arabic version of Kalila and Dimna, the Abbasid Dynasty, a man of
religion had a lot of power especially when religion and politics were readily conflated with each other. The Caliph was
at the same time the Emir prince of Believers. The word caliph itself denotes a successor to the Prophet of
Islam. In this context, a hermit is likely to have had more access to knowledge and religion resources than an unmarked
guest.
The Philosopher telling the story of the hermit and the fable within has his own power: in the decision to tell the
story and maybe invent the fable within and in his evaluation of the hermits behavior as less wrong than that of kings
who would allow their subjects to change or move up. The Philosophers power derives from the trust the King puts in
him, his knowledge and large repertoire of stories and fables and his narrative ability. He does not let the King down;
rather, he narrates an interesting story which unfolds into a fable, both assuring and comforting for a King and
silencing for those who have unwise ambitions, as it were.
Fortunately, the hermit himself could learn Hebrew and fortunately Ibn Al-Muqaffa could translate the fables into
Arabic. Both translation and foreign language learning are possible, in spite of all the difficulties involved. The very
existence of the famous fables of the two jackals Kalila and Dimna in many languages and cultures is in fact a tribute to
translation as a worthwhile human endeavor. Learning a foreign language is not as tough as the hermit in the story
indicates, but not everyone can, has the time to, or want to learn a language other than his/her own.
What seems to be at stake here is not whether learning a new language is possible or not; rather, it is the authority of
an elite in every community and at every period of time to determine what is doable and what is not, what is learnable
and what is not. Learning a foreign language is an important means of achieving social mobility, which might not be in
the best interest of a ruling, political or intellectual, elite. Moreover, helping people learn a foreign language may be a
burden on a (third world) countrys economy.
This is the lesson the Philosopher concludes his story and the fable within with, which is missing in many editions of
the fables. It is easier to persuade people not to learn a foreign language because it is unlearnable, not to translate
certain texts because they are untranslatable, than to passively watch them learn and translate and change to the extent
of revolting against the King. It is also either to persuade them that your palm-dates may not be palatable for them and the
trees may not transplant favorably to their lands than to let them have a share in your fortune. Where does Ibn Al-Muqaffa
stand? Is he against social and intellectual mobility as well as cultural interaction and interdependence?
If we identify Ibn Al-Muqaffa with the main speaker in the text, the hermit, the answer to the second question above
should be Yes. If we remember his definition of rhetoric as kashfu ma ghamuDa mina l aqq wa taSwiiru l aqqi fi
2531
Suurati l baaTil wa taSwiiru l baaTili fi Suurati l aqq (clarifying vague truths and representing whatever is true as
false and whatever is false as true) put forward in his Diwan Al-Maaani (The Grand Book of Meanings), as
reported in van Gelder (2003:326), the answer to the question will be more difficult to find.
It could be argued that Ibn Al-Muqaffa is subversively inviting people to challenge the common wisdom of
contentment. Or, he could be the narcissist intellectual denying mobility and learnability to others while granting them
to himself. Perhaps this is the authors appropriation of the old fables to the new socio-historical context, a context
lacking in democracy and social mobility and rich in silence and obedience, a context where quasi-sacred texts by
persons like the hermit continue to influence peoples attitude and behavior. In this case, the moral of the fable is at
odds with the authors own endeavors and attitudes as discussed earlier and with the uncontaminated Islamic values
of hard work, but NOT with the so many actual silencing practices of elites in the Arab-Islamic culture yesterday and
today, or with the popular attitudes of passive contentment in this culture.
The kind of moral the fable imparts might not be adequate or successful in other cultural contexts different from the
Arab world. In a culture of effort and self-improvement such as todays Western civilization, and in the golden age of
Islamic civilization to which Ibn Al-Muqaffa himself belongs, trying to do new and challenging things in order to bring
about positive changes in reality is always commendable. A contemporary Western reader may find some fun in the
fable, but not knowledge or wisdom. If the ultimate perlocutionary effects the story-telling seeks to achieve include, in
addition to the fun, passive silence, blind obedience and support, or acceptance, of existing power structures, the fable
of the Crow and the Partridge is an excellent choice.
This is obviously not everything in the fable and the stories that surround it. Much more could be said about the
hermits attitude toward the crows interlanguage, so to speak, in the narrative blend. Interlanguage is a human
phenomenon that should not occasion scorn or criticism which it really does in many parts of the region to which the
fable belongs. Discouraging can result in stigmatizing the interlanguage; more exposure often results in getting closer
to native proficiency in the foreign language. Getting closer here does not have to mean being a native speaker of the
foreign language. It should not mean moving away from the mother language, either. There is always a way to master a
foreign language, to learn a new walk, to transplant a new species of plants in a new soil, without losing the mother
language, the natural walk, or the local plants.
More could also be said about the economics and economy in the fable; specifically, on the extensions and
implications of the palm-trees. The palm-tree is an important ingredient of Arab-Islamic culture, with a host of
religious, social and cultural connotations and a significant economic value in many Arab countries. The tree can stand
for peace and opportunity and it can be a metonymy for riches and economic stability. In these senses, the hermit in the
text may be guarding an existing economic structure against neighboring parasites who wish to share the riches and the
prosperity of a privileged neighbor. The parasitical wish may translate into hatred, and it can amount to a war between
the haves and the have-nots, or an invasion of the former by the latter.
A serious issue that this article only occasionally suggested and which deserves a lot of further investigation has to
do with how knowledge is disseminated in Arab-Islamic culture, a culture where information, stories and news are
exchanged with very little, if any, credit to their sources. (We do not know for sure if the story of the hermit and his
guest happened at all somewhere.) From innocent appropriations of other peoples text and talk to outright plagiarism,
knowledge continues to be consumed in this and some other parts of the world without adequate concern with
attribution and copyright laws an unnecessary complication for many. Where this happens, science and knowledge
fade so easily into myth, folklore, rumor and gossip. It is then not very surprising that so many arguments and
conclusions such as those reported in this article can be based on a FABLE, albeit told by a hermit.
5. Conclusion
Fables remain worth our while even today, and they keep being cited, manipulated and reenacted in different forms
and for different purposes. The real danger is that they pass unquestioned from one generation to another and from one
culture to another. The fable from Kalila and Dimna illustrates many basic concepts and constructs in discourse and
communication power and knowledge, narrative embedding and contextomy and narrative dominance. The
illustration, however, is not uncolored by the context and the culture the fable comes from one where the authority of
a man of religion, however isolated from society, remains unquestioned.
To achieve its communicative goals, the text uses two important devices the fable genre and narrative embedding.
Both devices combine to create a sense of timelessness and to ensure knowledge and delight for the audience at one
2532
and the same time. The fable genre has always been used to pass moral statements which can be unquestioned, at least
uncensored because of the animal guises within and the ostensible entertainment part thereof. Narrative embedding, on
the other hand, allows various degrees of distancing and clouding of narrative responsibility. Leaps from one layer to
another and from one conceptual framework to another, and the metaphors and analogies created thereby, may not
always be warranted, as in the case of identifying learning to walk with learning to speak in this fable. Not surprisingly,
the leaps continue even beyond the text itself, so that the fable is quoted, out of context, in discussions of contemporary
issues of globalization, West vs. East, and foreign language learning in an Arab context.
Politics and power remain there, inside as well as outside the text. The hermit relies on his status, his knowledge and
his narrative authority to pass judgments and evaluations that are obviously debatable, at least today. Contemporary
writers who quote the fable rely on their knowledge thereof as well as the authority of narrative heritage. Against these,
the paper argues for a critical reexamination and demystification of fables of this sort, and the timeless truths, which
are timely and maybe untrue, therein, so that they do not prevent self-improvement and mobility, or cross-linguistic
and cross-cultural dialogue through their propagation of fear and avoidance of foreign languages and cultural and
economic isolation.
Transcription
The following symbols are used in transliterating Arabic words, phrases and sentences in the article:
. Long vowels and
geminate consonants are indicated by doubling the relevant symbols. Transliterations are given in italics.
Acknowledgements
I would like to sincerely thank two anonymous reviewers of the JOP for very carefully reading my MS and making
extremely valuable comments and corrections thereon, which I hope I have made good use of, for suggesting the
addition, and the wording thereof, on the possible reception of the fable in a Western context a context of effort and
self-improvement, and for making other important suggestions on many elements in the fable, e.g., the coda, abstract
and resolution. I also sincerely thank Jacob Mey not only for his patience and support, but also for the many corrections
and comments he made on earlier versions of this article. The usual disclaimers of course apply.
References
Allan, Keith, Burridge, Kate, 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Al-Qassim, Faisal, 2006. Arab media between Arabization and globalization. Retrieved February 27, 2007. http://www.doroob.com/?p=9178.
Argun, 2002. Reflections from a country used to be named Algeria. Retrieved Feb. 27, 2007. http://www.alsakher.com/vb2/archive/index.php/
t-86903.html.
Austin, John L., 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Bach, Kent, Harnish, Robert M., 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Barnett, William, Hansen, Morten, 1996. The red queen in organizational evolution. Strategic Management Journal 17, 139157.
Berinsky, Adam J., Kinder, Donald R., 2006. Making sense of issues through media frames: understanding the Kosovo Crisis. The Journal of Politics
68 (3), 640656.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, 1993. You gotta know how to tell a story: telling, tales, and tellers in American and Israeli narrative events at dinner.
Language in Society 22, 361402.
Boyce, Kate, 2004. Fable mountain. Learning, University of North Carolina: Lesson Plans. http://www.learnnc.org/media/lessons/
katebboyce1142004123/2_graphic_organizer.html.
Brooks, Peter, 1984. Reading for the Plot. Knopf, New York.
Brown, W. Norman, 1922. A comparative translation of the Arabic Kalila wa Dimna, Chapter VI. Journal of the American Oriental Society 42,
215250.
Bumpus, Minnette, 2000. Brothers and sisters: a novel way to teach human resource management. Journal of Management Education 24, 366377.
Butler, Gary R., 1992. Indexicality, authority, and communication in traditional narrative discourse. The Journal of American Folklore 105 (415),
3456.
Cap, P., 2008. Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 40, 1741.
Cooren, Francois, 2008. Between semiotics and pragmatics: opening language studies to textual agency. Journal of Pragmatics 40, 116.
Crisp, Peter, 2001. Allegory: conceptual metaphor in history. Language and Literature 10, 519.
Dorriots, Beatriz, Johansson, Inga-Lill, 1999. Communicative power: a linguistic approach to the study of the microdynamics of organizations.
Scandinavian Journal of Management 15, 193211.
2533
Downing, Laura H. 2000. Alice in Pragmaticland: reference, deixis and the delimitation of text worlds in Lewis Carrolls Alice Books. Retrieved
Feb. 22, 2007. http://www.ucm.es/info/circulo/no2/hidalgo.htm.
El-Najjar, Mohammed R., 1995. Animal stories in Arabic heritage (in Arabic). Aalam El-Fikr 24 (1), 187212.
Ermida, Isabel, 2006. Linguistic mechanisms of power in nineteen eighty-four: applying politeness theory to Orwells world. Journal of Pragmatics
38, 842862.
Fauconnier, Gilles, Turner, Mark, 1998. Conceptual Integration Networks. Cognitive Science 22 (2), 133187.
Fauconnier, Gilles, Turner, Mark, 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Minds Hidden Complexity. Basic Books, New York.
Fludernik, Monika, 2003. Scene shift, metalepsis, and the metaleptic mode. Style, winter 2003. Retrieved April 1, 2007. http://www.encyclopedia.
com/doc/1G1-123581243.html.
Flyvbjerg, Bent, 1998. Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Fox, Roy F., 2000. MediaSpeak: Three American Voices. Greenwood Publishing Group, Connecticut and London.
Fowler, Roger, Kress, Gunther, 1979. In: Fowler, R., et al. (Eds.), Critical Linguistics. pp. 185213.
Fowler, Roger, Hodge, Bob, Kress, Gunther, Trew, Tony, 1979. Language and Control. Routledge, London and New York.
Fujii, Yasunari, 2007. Tell me about when you were hitchhiking: the organization of story initiation by Australian and Japanese speakers. Language
in Society 36, 183211.
Gamson, William A., Modigliani, Andre, 1987. The changing culture of affirmative action. In: Braumgart, R.A. (Ed.), Research in Political
Sociology, vol. 3. JAI, Greenwich, pp. 137177.
Genette, Gerard, 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York.
Ghazoul, Ferial J., 1983. Poetic logic in the Panchatantra and the Arabian Nights. Arab Studies Quarterly 5, 1321.
Goffman, Erving, 1981. Forms of Talk. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA.
Gutas, Dimitri, 1981. Classical Arabic wisdom literature: nature and scope. Journal of the American Oriental Society 101 (1), 4986.
Henricks, Mark, 2001. Wag your tale. Entrepreneur Magazine. Retrieved January 5, 2009. http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneur/
2001/february/36180.html.
Herman, David, 2006. Genette meets Vygotsky: narrative embedding and distributed intelligence. Language and Literature 15, 357380.
Ibn Al-Muqaffa, Abdullah, 1983. Kalila wa Dimna (in Arabic), 4th ed. Dar Al-Andalus, Beirut.
Jabri, Muayyad, 2006. Narrative genre, social context, and the management of people: intimations from the PRC. Asia Pacific Journal of Human
Resources 44, 364373.
Jahn, Manfred, 2005. Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative. English Department, University of Cologne. http://www.uni-koeln.de/
ame02/pppn.htm#N5.
Jameson, Daphne A., 2001. Narrative discourse and management action. Journal of Business Communication 38, 476511.
Kubaani, Z., 2005. A comparative reading of a story from Kalila wa Dimna. Retrieved February 27, 2007. newroz: http://www.yek-dem.com.
Labov, William, 1972. Language in the Inner City. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA.
Labov, William, Fanshel, David, 1977. Therapeutic Discourse. Academic Press, New York.
Lakoff, George, 1993a. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In: Ortony, A. (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, pp. 202251.
Lakoff, R., 1993b. Lewis Carroll: subversive pragmaticist. Pragmatics 3 (4), 367385.
Lakoff, George, Turner, Mark, 1989. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Matoesian, Greg, 2000. Intertextual authority in reported speech: production media in the Kennedy Smith rape trial. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 879914.
Mazid, Bahaa-eddin M., 2006. A sad email from Baghdad: a narrative-discourse analysis. Cairo Studies in English 122.
Mazid, Bahaa-eddin M., 2007. Politics of Translation: Power and Ideology, Culture and X-phemism in Translation between Arabic and English.
Lincom Europa, Munich.
Mazid, Bahaa-eddin M., 2008. Cowboy and misanthrope: a critical analysis of Bush and bin Laden cartoons. Discourse & Communication 2 (4),
433457.
McGlone, Matthew S., 2005. Quoted out of context: contextomy and its consequences. Journal of Communication (June), 330346.
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, 2006. Islam and the enlightenment: between ebb and flow. Logos. Retrieved Feb. 28, 2007. http://www.logosjournal.com/
issue_5.3/meddeb.htm.
Metcalf, James A., 2005. George Orwells Animal Farm: a case study in leadership/management for undergraduate nursing students. Nurse
Education in Practice 5, 252254.
Milton, Constance L., 2006. Fables: Ways of knowing and understanding meaning in nursing. Nursing Science Quarterly 19, 100103.
Naithani, Sadhana, 2004. The teacher and the taught: structures and meaning in the Arabian Nights and the Panchatantra. Marvels & Tales 18 (2),
272285.
Nelles, William, 2002. Stories within stories: narrative levels and embedded narrative. In: Richardson, B. (Ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on
Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. The Ohio State University Press, Ohio, pp. 339353.
Norrick, Neal R., 2000. Conversational Narrative: Storytelling in Everyday Talk. John Benjamins, Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
Pancatantra, 2007. In: Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved February 22, 2007. Encyclopedia Britannica Online: http://www.search.eb.com/eb/
article-9058226.
Parse, Rosemarie R., 1998. The Human Becoming School of Thought: A Perspective for Nurses and Other Health Professionals. Sage, Thousand
Oaks, CA.
Patterson, Annabel, 1991. Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History. Duke University Press, Durham and London.
Polanyi, Livia, 1979. So whats the point? Semiotica 25, 207241.
Richards, Jack C., 1974. Error Analysis: Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. Longman, London.
2534
Richmond, Virginia P., Davis, Leonard M., Saylor, Kitty, McCroskey, James C., 1984. Power strategies in organizations: communication techniques
and messages. Human Communication Research 11 (1), 85108.
Scheffer, Thomas, 2007. On procedural discoursivation or how local utterances are turned into binding facts. Language & Communication 27, 127.
Searle, John R., 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts. Language and Society 5, 123.
Seguin, Eve, 2001. Narration as legitimation: the case of in vitro fertilization. Discourse & Society 12, 195215.
Sheafer, Tamir, 2007. How to evaluate it: the role of story-evaluative tone in agenda setting and priming. Journal of Communication 57, 2139.
Shepherd, Valerie, 1995. Narrative survival: the power of personal narration, discussed through the personal story-telling of fictional characters,
particularly those created by Margaret Atwood. Language & Communication 15, 355373.
Short, Jeremy C., Ketchen Jr., David J., 2005. Teaching timeless truths through classic literature: Aesops fables and strategic management. Journal
of Management Education 29, 816832.
Shuman, Amy, 1986. Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Singer, Peter, Singer, Renata, 2005. The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics through Literature. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Squire, Corinne, 2005. Reading narratives. Group Analysis 38, 91107.
Stevenson, William B., 1996. A muse of fire or a winter of discontent: teaching Shakespeare in the leadership course. Journal of Management
Education 20, 3947.
Stewart, Susan, 1991. Notes on distressed genres. The Journal of American Folklore 104 (411), 531.
Suleman, Fahmida, 2006. Kalila wa Dimna. In: Meri, Josef W. (Ed.), Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Routledge, London
and New York, pp. 432433.
Tendahl, Markus, Gibbs Jr., Raymond W., 2008. Complementary perspectives on metaphor: cognitive linguistics and relevance theory. Journal of
Pragmatics 40, 18231864.
Turner, Mark, 1996. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Turner, Mark, 2000. Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Cybereditions, New Zealand.
Turner, Mark, 2003. Double-scope stories. In: Herman, D. (Ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. CSLI (Center for the Study of
Language and Information) Publications, Stanford, pp. 126.
Turner, Mark, 2006. Compression and representation. Language and Literature 15 (1), 1727.
van Dijk, Teun A., 1993. Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 4, 249283.
van Dijk, T.A., 1998. Categories for the critical analysis of parliamentary debates about immigration. Retrieved January 20, 2005. http://
www.hum.uva.nl/teun/categor2.htm.
van Dijk, Teun A., 2006. Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & Society 17, 359383.
van Gelder, Geert J., 2003. Beautifying the ugly and uglifying the beautiful: the paradox in Classical Arabic literature. Journal of Semitic Studies
XLVIII (2), 321351.
van Leeuwen, Theo, 2007. Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse & Communication 1 (1), 91112.
Wacks, David, 2003. The performativity of Ibn Al-Muqaffas Kalila wa Dimna and Maqamat Al-Luzumiyya of Al-Saraqusi. Journal of Arabic
Literature 34 (12), 178189.
Wennerstrom, Ann, 2001. Intonation and evaluation in oral narratives. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 11831206.
Young, M.J.L., 1982. Some aspects of symbolic writing in the modern Arabic short story. Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 9 (1),
1421.
Young, Nathan, Matthews, Ralph, 2007. Experts understanding of the public: knowledge control in a risk controversy. Public Understanding of
Science 16, 123144.
Zeuschner, Raymond, 2003. Communicating Today: The Essentials. Pearson Education, New York.

Date-Palms Language and The Power of Kno PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Date-Palms Language and The Power of Kno PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier.

Author's personal copy

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Date-palms, language and the power of knowledge:

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

3.4. Analyzing a fable

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Diagram 1. Narrative levels in the fable, adapted from Herman (2006:363).

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Diagram 2. Fauconnier and Turners (2002:46) model of conceptual integration.

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Diagram 3. Metaphors of learning a foreign language in the fable.

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

Author's personal copy

B.M. Mazid / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 25152534

You might also like