The Rhetorical Function of Sentence Mood in Nezami’s Khosrow and Shirin

Nezami’s poetry has a great rhetorical value. The poet’s attention to rhetorical principles and the way of relationship between poet and audience are the most important discourses in Nezami’s poetry that through the illustration of these discourses we can understand poet’s ability in his poetical art and his influence on the audience. In Khosro and Shirin versified story the poet has used conversation more than his other works. The audience presence and the poet’s attention to the audience are completely evident and there is a mutual relationship between the speaker and the listener. Therefore, his poems have many different sentence moods and by analyzing these moods we can perceive their literary and artistic function. One of the sentence syntactic characteristics is “mood” that has a very important function in rhetorical analyzing literary contexts. The sentence mood indicates the interactive function of language and shows the rate of relationship between author and his audience. Accordingly, the sentence moods are the most effective principles of mobility and polyphony of the context. In declarative sentences the relationship between the author and the audience is one-sided and the sentences have less mobility. However, in interrogative and imperative sentences the audience interacts with the author and this interaction increases the context mobility. In this research the position of sentence mood in Nezami’s poetry is discussed with emphasis on Khosro and Shirin versified story.