The semantics of love in the review of mystical texts based on the Relevance theory

Abstract

This research examines the meaning of love on the basis of mystical texts. The theoretical basis of the study is the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson. The result of this research shows that in the review of mystical texts (a case study of a sonnet from Hafez's Divan) from the audience's point of view, love has no prescribed and predetermined meaning and is in fact a multiple phenomenon And because of the impossibility of expressing metaphysical experiences in mysticism the mystics’s speech is implicitly presented to the audience in the form of textural patterns. And this is the reason for the emergence of multiple phenomena of semantics outside the world of mysticism. According to relevance theory, these implications comprise a series of strong and weak hints that the reader of the text interprets depending on the encyclopedic information and the contents of long-term and short-term memory, as well as on his own perceptual context and other cases, and whenever the listener's expectation of the relevance of the message seems sufficient, he abandons the attempt. In addition, using a questionnaire created on the basis of relevance theory and the importance of contextual implications for the method of exploratory comprehension of words, factors such as age, gender, education, beliefs, etc. were examined and it showed that some of these factors can affect the reader's perception of love is effective in rereading mystical texts and others.

Keywords

• relevance theory
• love
• mystical text
• determinism and multiple phenomenon