Communication Elements and Medieval Poetic Forms

Elements of Communication

The basic elements of communication are the transmitter, the receiver and the communicative situation. The transmitter and receiver share communicative competence, which includes:

Communicative competence

• Linguistic competence: the ability to express and understand well-formed messages.
• Pragmatic competence: the ability to produce and understand the right messages for the communicative situation.
• Knowledge of the world: a set of extralinguistic knowledge related to other parties and the topics being discussed in communication.

Speech and its aspects

Speech (the minimal unit of linguistic communication) has several aspects:

• Set (what we say).
• Communicative action (what we do by saying it).
• Effect (what we obtain as a result).

Functions according to language

• Contact: to start, maintain, or terminate contact.
• Expressive: to express the speaker's mood.
• Directive: to request that the recipient behave in a certain way.
• Informative: to convey something new to the recipient.
• Aesthetic: to attract the receiver's attention.

Properties of the text

The text is the maximal unit of linguistic communication. It is characterized primarily by intentionality and has the following properties:

• Adaptation to the concrete communicative situation, which makes the unit meaningful.
• Coherence: the contents are interrelated and make sense as a whole.
• Cohesion: the relationships between parts of the text and the receiver are signaled through linguistic mechanisms.

Mechanisms of cohesion

Common mechanisms of cohesion include:

• Recurrence: words or lexical items that are repeated throughout the text (they may include synonyms).
• Pro-forms: elements that refer back to another unit, such as pronouns (e.g., "these").
• Textual markers: words or phrases used to define, assemble and link successive units and to convey a point of view.

Ballads and Medieval Poetic Forms

The ballads are poems of oral transmission with variable length. They typically use octosyllabic verses with paired rhyme, simple syntax, dramatic dialogue and epic epithets.

Classification of ballads includes: historical, Carolingian, Moorish, romantic and lyrical types.

Mester de clerecía and cuaderna vía

Mester de clerecía (the narrative tradition of the clergy) comprises didactic poems that consist of cuaderna vía stanzas.

Manrique and the Coplas

Manrique's Coplas address fortune, time and death. They take up the ubi sunt motif and are often allegorical in nature.

Lyrical Romance: Jarchas and Muwashshahat

The demonstration of lyrical romance includes the jarchas, which in al-Andalus are short stanzas of about five to six lines composed in a mixture of colloquial Romance and Arabic or Hebrew elements. They are popular (vulgar) verses and form the final section of the muwashshah (Arabic strophic poem).

The muwashshahat and their concluding jarchas constitute the core of many Andalusi poetic compositions.