Qur'anic Semantics: Corpus and Lexical Behavior

by Hussein Abdul-Raof

Qur'anic semantics is concerned (i) lexical occurrence, (ii) lexical behavior, (iii) word order, (iv) discourse semantics where the purposeful selection of a specific word is interrelated to discourse discursive semantics, (v) lexis meaning which is motivated by discourse ideology, Ideological connotative meanings, and (vi) the semantic analysis of the text mood and diction. Qur’anic semantics shows the (i) the number of times a word occurs in the whole text, (ii) how the meaning of the word changes according to the context in which it occurs, and (iii) why a given grammatical structure occurs rather than a different one. Qur’anic semantics examines the semantic aspects which have impact on meaning on the word and sentence levels. These aspects (i) content words (verbs, nouns, nominalized nouns, active/passive participle nouns, adjectives), (ii) function words such as the additive conjunctions such as (thumma – and) and (wa – and), (iii) tense (present, past, future), (iv) marked (unusual) / unmarked (usual) word order, and (v) no-main-verb nominal or main-verb sentences. Qur’anic semantics is of value to Qur'anic corpus linguistics, lexicographers, Qur'anic linguistics, and translation studies.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2023