Secondary Meanings of Interrogative Sentences in Parvin E’tesâmi Poems

Abstract

A sentence can structurally be used in three forms: declarative, interrogative, and imperative. Semantically, each type may have different meanings in various contexts. The discussion of secondary or multiple meanings of a sentence has long been considered by rhetoricians, especially in the field of semantics. The secondary meanings of the above three sentences have been frequently debated. It has also been considered in today’s pragmatics. In this paper, Parvin E’tesâmi’s poems have been studied from the perspective of secondary meanings in interrogative sentences. The question of this research is to recognize what are the secondary meanings of interrogative sentences in her poems in order to determine the capacity range of these kinds of sentences in the Persian language and the literary context. The study showed that out of 639 interrogative sentences, 34 are real questions and 29 have secondary or implicit meanings. Out of 29 secondary meanings, the most frequency belongs to the denial questions and the least to regret ones. The expression of several secondary meanings in one sentence has simultaneously been found in her works. This study shows that despite the different time periods and her gender (being a woman), her literary text, like other texts of outstanding poets in Persian literature, had more desire to use the interrogative sentences in the secondary sense and the literary context enhances the capacity to utilize interrogative sentences in secondary meanings.

Keywords

• parvin e’tesâmi
• interrogative sentences
• pragmatics
• rhetoric
• secondary meanings