A Criticism Discourse Analysis of Silence in Akhavan Sales's Poetry: Structural, Semantic, and Pragmatic Dimensions in Literary

This study investigates silence as a discursive construct in the poetry of Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, examining its representational mechanisms and functional dynamics across three levels: structural, semantic, and pragmatic. The primary research objective is to elucidate the discursive functions of silence in meaning-making processes and the activation of intertextual perception. Employing a qualitative, descriptive-analytical methodology, the research integrates theoretical frameworks from discourse analysis, semiotics, and cognitive linguistics to analyze Akhavan-Sales's poetic works. The findings demonstrate that silence operates structurally through verbal ellipsis and syntactic stasis, semantically through metaphorical and metonymic representations that encode socio-political concepts within specific historical-cultural contexts, and pragmatically as a discursive device that actively engages readers in textual interpretation and intertextual comprehension. Furthermore, the study reveals how strategically employed silence - through meaningful pauses and deliberate omissions - fosters artistic concision, symbolic imagery, narrative suspension, and multi-layered spatiality in Akhavan-Sales's poetry, while simultaneously activating the reader's hermeneutic system. The analysis ultimately positions poetic silence not as mere absence of speech, but as a potent rhetorical strategy that demands active reader participation and facilitates the transmission of complex socio-political commentary.