Panegyrists, Vagueness and the Pragmeme

This chapter is concerned with mourning ceremonies held for Shiite Muslims in the city of Isfahan, Iran. The chapter examines how in Persian funeral culture “rules of language and society synergize in determining meaning” (Capone A, J Pragmatics 37:1355–1371, 2005: 1357). Grounded in Mey’s (Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, 2001; Pragmatic acts. In: Brown K (ed) Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (Online Version). Elsevier, Oxford, 2006) and Capone’s (La linguistique 46:3–21, 2010) conceptualisation of the pragmeme – a situated speech act – the present study seeks to explain how the talk given and monodies sung by professional panegyrists are supposed to provide solace and comfort to the relatives of the deceased. To this end, I shall draw on a corpus personally collected in the context of the mosque, where relatives and friends typically gather to mourn the deceased. In this respect, I will explain how panegyrists use vague language in such an ‘elastic’ (Zhang G, Elastic language: how and why we stretch our words. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015) way as to provide solace to the bereaved family. The study reveals how vague forms that lack full semantic content and are thus dependent on shared knowledge are employed by panegyrists to bring about effects that correspond to the requirements of the mourning sessions under investigation.