“Don’t Believe It, O Dove”: Displaced Addressees and Suspended Sincerity in the Arabic Lullaby

Speech-act and participation theory presuppose a hearer who can take up what is said. The lullaby is addressed, by convention, to an infant who cannot, and this article asks what its insistent second person is doing and whether an illocutionary act can take an addressee who is not yet competent to receive it. The question is pursued through Arabic, where one widely attested Levantine formula promises the infant a slaughtered dove and then, turning to the dove, cancels the promise in the same utterance. A primary corpus of thirty-nine sleep-directed Arabic lullabies from the Levant, Egypt, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, Sudan, and the Maghreb was assembled from published, citable sources, read against the classical dandling (tarqīṣ) tradition and cross-cultural comparators, and coded independently by two raters for displaced address, sincerity suspension, and proleptic address, with high inter-rater agreement. Three findings result. The genre distributes illocutionary force between the infant and displaced addressees (God, animals, absent kin, the singer herself). It operates under a generic suspension of sincerity conditions that explicit diagnostics distinguish from lying, fiction, irony, and play. Its second person has a proleptic dimension, oriented to the hearer the child will become. The lullaby is therefore a well-formed communicative genre rather than a defective one, and the resulting three-way distinction, sincere, insincere, and sincerity-suspended, extends speech-act and participation-framework theory to hearers who cannot yet take up what they are told and offers intercultural researchers an apparatus for reading the cradle’s coded discourse across traditions.