Artificial punning in the Egyptian Arabic ballad: A reinterpretation of structuralist poetics

This article presents a linguistic analysis of a specific feature of a literary genre: the artificial punning found in the Egyptian Arabic narrative ballad (as described in Cachia 1989). A comparison of how these puns differ from regular processes in the phonology and morphology of the language reveals that this encoding by the poet-performer is very much a mirror image of regular processes. The audience's decoding of them, therefore, follows a pathway similar to regular processes. The dichotomy between the puns' linguistically based formal composition and their contextually based semantic interpretation is analyzed within a reinterpretation of a Jakobsonian structuralist framework involving a hierarchization of linguistic levels based on two factors : the degree of combinatoric freedom and the degree of semantic immediacy. This analysis reveals that the artificial punning in these ballads is actually the obverse of what one would expect to find following the definition of poetic discourse given by Roman Jakobson. This study thus shows that such artificial punning subverts normal expectations about poetic discourse and this has great implications for understanding the production and interpretation of literary word play in any tradition.