Alliteration in the poetry of Abi Nawas

Abstract

This study aims at identifying a rhetorical phenomenon that has a great importance, which is paronomasia in one of the notable poets at the Abbasid era, the poet Abu Nuas. This rhetorical style is one of the rhetorical arts which is well-known in type of figurative speech in Arabic as a stylistic phenomenon characterized with aesthetic, phonetic and rhythmic function in Arabic poetry, that some scholars considered paronomasia as an architectural structure of the Arabic poems as it rests on a type of harmony and uniformity in speech. Abu Nuas was very surpassing in terms of employing all the artistic aspects and stylistic phenomena in his poems especially when he used the rhetorical styles that achieve formal, phonetic and rhythmic functions in poetry. He was regarded as a member of the rhetorical school of the Arabic poetry along with other poets like Muslim Ibn AlWaleed and Abu Tammam, who were fond of this style of Arabic rhetoric that they were even criticized due to their frequent and repeated use of it. Therefore, the researcher chose this topic in some models of Abu Nuas poetry. The study was divided into two sections; the first tackled the definition of paronomasia and its origin in Arabic and discussing its types, while the second section dealt with paronomasia in Abu Nuas poems and some models of his poems were chosen according to the type of paronomasia.

Although this research tended to be brief and concise as this phenomenon is very vast in Abu Nuas poems, but the researcher could shed light on the publicity of this phenomenon in his poems in addition to other rhetorical phenomena in his poems that require studies such as allegory antithesis, turning and miracles on the chest and others.