Cultural Conceptualizations of the Six Traits of Sayyid—The Pre-Islamic Arabic Cultural Conceptualizations Encoded in Formulas of Language of Early Arabic Poetry

The figure of sayyid ‘[tribal] chief or lord’ was a role model of pre-Islamic Arabic society, whose ideal behavior was conceptualized as a set of certain character traits. In this chapter, I propose to analyze metonymic and metaphoric conceptualizations of the most significant of those traits encoded in the stock of formulas of the language of Early Arabic Poetry from the sixth and seventh century. The aim of my analyses was to reconceptualize the traditional understanding of the traits of sayyid, which can be seen as the representation of the pre-Islamic Arabic script for honorable behavior (Pietrzak, The concept of honor in the language of early Arabic poetry. A cultural linguistic study. Peter Lang, 2022). By analyzing the metonymic and metaphoric models present in the corpus of Early Arabic Poetry as well as in the lexicographical works on Classical Arabic, I represent the most important stereotypical scenarios of this behavior, as well as the relationships between it and different physical imageries. Additionally, I briefly discuss the issue of the validity of cultural linguistic research on the formulaic language of Early Arabic Poetry, as well as the affinity of al-Ǧurǧānī’s conception of metonymy to the cognitive linguistic perspective on that phenomenon.