Sound and Sense Enchantment in the Persian New Year's Opening Prayer as a Literary Text

Abstract

This paper closely examines the Persian New Year's opening prayer as a literary text. Regarding different communicative models, including the Jacobson model, it shows that these models have never considered a place for religious communicative discourse. This paper endeavors to be a threshold for religious discourse, especially prayers. In doing so, it, first of all deals with the background of prayer as a literary work. It then points to the components of the language of prayer. Thirdly, it studies closely the prayer's poetic function in terms of structure and functions of the language of prayer. The emphasis, then, goes on to the phonological aspects of the New Year's prayer: alliteration, assonance, consonance, words play, rhyme and rhythm.

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