Bayān, Gesture, and Genre: Self-Positioning in al-Jurjānī’s Introductions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the generic affiliations in the introductions to ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s (d. 471/1078 or 474/1081) Asrār al-balāgha and Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz, identifying their interlocutors, polemical purposes, and generic aspirations. Asrār al-balāgha aims to displace al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868-9) as a theorist, while Dalāʾil al-iʿjāz addresses not only the Muʿtazilī theologian ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. ca. 415/1024), but also a group espousing an instrumentalist language theory, whom I identify as legal theorists (uṣūlīs) of all stripes. Al-Jurjānī’s critique alerts us to a history of instrumentalist language theory, and allows for a richer reexamination of the multifarious afterlife of al-Jāḥiẓ’s theory of communication (bayān), and his concept of gesture (ishāra). His critique of the instrumentalist group reflects a concern among fifth/eleventh-century legal theorists to ground their discipline more deeply in philology, especially grammar.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".