Author

• S Bāmeshki

Abstract

Maqālāt Shams as an eminent and significant work in the history of mysticism and Persian literature, which has a close relation with Rumi’s life and work, not only ignord by common readers but also research scholars have not paid attention to it properly. One of the main reasons of this, seems to be scattered sentences and lack of apparent firmness of the text, which have caused it appears ambiguous.
In the present paper, the origin of the ambiguity is examined. For this, the method of ‘discourse analysis’ with emphasis on grammatical cohesion, including reference and ellipsis has been used.
As a result, the causes of existence of ambiguity in the text are as fallows: Unawareness of readers of the most important stylistic feature of the text i.e. ‘brevity’; use of personal pronouns as endophoric and anafra reference, use of masculine third person pronoun i.e. ‘he’ in the meaning of man in general, omission of particular nouns in order to preserveng brevity, shift of verb from third person to first person and vice versa, use of ellipsis, exist of ambigiuty in distinction between speaker and listener in the structure of conversation, unfamiliarity of modern readers with contextual situations and background knowledge.

Keywords

• Ambiguity
• Maqālāt
• discourse
• analysis
• Grammatical Cohesion