Syntactic Economy in the Poetry of Abd al-Mahdi Matar: Ellipsis, Restriction and the Passive Voice as a Single Structure - A Statistical Grammatical Study

Abstract
This study is based on a hypothesis that challenges the prevailing approach in most stylistic studies to syntactic phenomena in poetry. While ellipsis, restriction, and the passive voice have traditionally been treated as three separate phenomena, this study considers them three syntactic operations within a single strategy that may be termed "syntactic economy". This strategy is based on asserting the effect and closing the door to alternative possibilities while concealing or generalizing the agent. Ellipsis removes an element, restriction narrows the scope of judgment, and the passive voice suppresses the agent. All three operate in the same direction: reducing the number of explicitly mentioned entities in the sentence while increasing its semantic load. The study adopts a closed corpus consisting of three poems from the poet’s collection, edited by Muhammad Reza al-Qamusi: "The Loss of the Basran Nation", "Here I Am, O Spirit of Abu al-Jawad", and "O Abu Dharr". The occurrences of the three phenomena were identified and classified according to the element economized. Each occurrence was then subjected to three procedural tests: the restoration test, which restores the omitted element, removes the restrictive device, and converts the passive into the active voice in order to measure the resulting semantic loss; the functional distribution test, based on the purpose of each poem; and the interaction test, which examines the occurrence of two or three operations within a single poetic line.