ABSTRACT
Rhetoric is the flesh and blood of the Arabic language. It is a linguistic discipline that aims to sharpen up and upgrade the linguistic competence of writing and speaking. It provides us, as language users, with the appropriate and effective stylistic mechanisms required for eloquently forceful discourse. Thus, Arabic rhetoric makes language meet the communicative needs of the language user. Rhetoric in Arabic, however, is a distinct discipline from Arabic grammar (see 1.2). Arabic rhetoric is concerned with speech acts which are pregnant with communicative goals. Therefore, it plays a significant role in interpersonal communication. It regulates the relationship between the text producer, i.e. the interlocutor, the speaker, or writer, and the text receiver, i.e. the audience or the addressee such as the listener or the reader. Rhetoric in Arabic combines speech act knowledge with context knowledge. In other words, the communicator analyses the communicative context of his or her speech act with a view to determining whether a given speech act will meet its desired communicative goal. Thus, the speech act is a predetermined communicative activity by its producer. Interpersonal communication, therefore, is not regulated haphazardly. Therefore, rhetoric in Arabic is directly related to the psychological processes of speech acts production and reception. The psychology of communication features saliently in Arabic rhetoric. As language users and text producers, we need our communication to be expressive and forceful. If language is the weapon, words are the bullets. Arabic rhetoric, therefore, is directly related to stylistics which is the bridge between literature and linguistics. However, the major aim of Arabic rhetoric is to enable the learner of Arabic to relay his or her intended communicative meaning to the addressee through the application of rhetorical means and eloquent criteria. Arabic rhetoric is concerned with the truth or falsehood of a given speech act in relation to the external world. Thus, as an approach to communication, Arabic rhetoric is a bridge between logic and language. A speech act may be compatible
or incompatible with the real world and external realities. Similarly, a speech act may be ideologically neutral or biased.
