Arabic Rhetorical Device Taxonomy
| Page information | |
|---|---|
| 🔗 Live DOI | 10.64393/balagha.ARDT |
| Date | 19 November 2025 |
| Supplementary file | Download from Github |
| Download PDF | |
The Arabic Rhetorical Device Taxonomy (ARDT) is a taxonomy of classical Arabic rhetorical devices published as part of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Rhetoric. The ARDT was originally developed in 2021 for research into rhetorical density, a quantitative linguistics metric for measuring the density of rhetorical devices in texts, where the accurate and consistent identification of rhetorical devices is essential. In continuous development since 2021, the ARDT is now a foundational resource in Arabic rhetoric. It provides educators and researchers in corpus linguistics, natural language processing, digital humanities with a stable, citable reference for Arabic rhetorical devices.
The ARDT systematises 95 rhetorical devices drawn from the three major branches of classical rhetoric: ʿilm al-maʿānī, ʿilm al-bayān, and ʿilm al-badīʿ, in addition to a small set of negative rhetorical effects.
It includes:
- A hierarchical ontology of all Arabic rhetorical devices
- Definitions grounded in classical Arabic sources
- Examples and usage notes
- PDF, self-contained HTML, and machine-readable snapshots of all entries
- A complete taxonomy index for quick navigation
- Version-locked documentation suitable for academic citation and peer review
Version 0.1.1 (20 November 2025)
Version 0.1.1 of the ARDT introduces full machine-readable exports of the Arabic Rhetorical Device Taxonomy to support digital humanities research, linked-data workflows, and reproducible computational analysis. It is available on GitHub and Zenodo.
Added in this release:
- A new machine-readable/ directory containing:
- Each file corresponds to a single rhetorical device (Q-item) from BalaghaBase.org, the project's custom Wikibase instance.
- Formats are aligned with semantic web standards and suitable for ingestion into digital humanities tools, corpus annotation systems, and knowledge graphs.
This marks the first structured data release of the taxonomy, expanding its use beyond human-readable PDF/HTML formats into machine-actionable forms.
Version 0.1.0 (17 November 2025)
Version 0.1.0 is the first public, versioned release of the Arabic Rhetorical Device Taxonomy, making three years of iterative development openly available on GitHub and Zenodo.
Included in this release:
- Complete taxonomy of 95 rhetorical devices across ʿilm al-maʿānī, ʿilm al-bayān and ʿilm al-badīʿ.
- Full Table of Contents with PDF, HTML and live external links.
- PDF and HTML snapshot exports from the Encyclopedia of Arabic Rhetoric.
- A combined PDF of all devices for offline use.
- CITATION.cff, README, and LICENSE.
- Stable structure suitable for long-term citation and archiving.
First pre-release draft version (6 September 2022)
The first draft of the taxonomy was created and submitted as part of a Master's dissertation at the University of Exeter. The taxonomy was created to assist in accurately identifying Arabic rhetorical devices in texts, as part of a research project to measure the rhetorical density of texts.
- Rhetorical density is a novel quantitative linguistics metric, based on the relative frequency analysis of rhetorical devices. It enables comparative measurement of rhetoricity across texts and genres. It is defined as the number of rhetorical devices per 100 orthographic words or word units.
This early version of the taxonomy formed the conceptual foundation for identifying Arabic rhetorical devices consistently, and for building a stable ontology for rhetorical analysis.
Page History
- 2026-02-13 - DOI and Infobox added.
- 2025-11-19 - Page created: Arabic Rhetorical Device Taxonomy.
