Kinds and Functions of Allusion in English and Arabic Languages: A contrastive Study

Abstract

Abstract

   Allusion is a linguistic phenomenon that is usually considered as an implicit reference to a person, an event or to another work of literature, social, or political art. It is normally a sort of appeal to a hearer/reader to share knowledge with the speaker/ author and the hearer or reader should comprehend the speaker/author's intention, otherwise an allusion come to be merely a decorative device. Allusion is drawn to rhetoric of speeches of ancient well-known philosophers like Aristo and Plato. Successful politicians’ language often occurs to be persuasive and for the purpose of persuasion, among other rhetorical strategies, they use extremely conventionalized allusion. In Arabic this term is widely used and highly associated with their literary work, and some of important names are  Aziz Bagh and Zafar Is-haq Ansari . Lately, the phenomenon has been pointed to in new trends in linguistics as in pragmatics and conversational analysis.   The present study is an attempt to highlight the similarities and differences between English and Arabic as far as the types and the functions of allusion is taken under consideration. Accordingly, it aims at classifying these kinds and the functions in these two different languages (English and Arabic) so as to find to which extent they are similar or different in employing this phenomenon. It is hypothesized that allusion is classified in similar way, and has similar functions in the two languages, but English is more explicit. As such, the study concluded with two significant facts; English is more explicit in this regard and the classification and the functions of allusion are different in the two languages