"واسأل القرية": "الحشد" صياغة سيميائية لمفهومي الحذف والاتساع

Ibrahim Taha asserts in his article, “ ‘Ask the City’: Al-ḥashd a Biosemiotic Concept Proposed to Replace the Classical terms ḥadhf and ittisāʿ”, that the formal and syntactic concept ḥadhf (“Elision/Omission”) is unable to explain the overall meanings and significances which might be attached to an expression as frequently insisted by Sībawayhi and his followers. Al-ḥashd (“Assemblage”) is an alternative concept proposed here to replace the former one by biosemiotic terminology. The central example in the article examines the proposed concept in the Quranic phrase, wa-sʾal al-qarya [12:82]. The article shows that no ḥadhf took place in this Quranic phrase because ḥadhf, as asserted by Sībawayhi, not only cannot “enlarge” the meanings of the phrase but, on the contrary, it greatly reduces them. Involving terminology from a biosemiotic field, al-ḥashd exploits three elementary terms (the “general context and the story behind the phrase”, the “addresser/addressee interrelations” and the “syntactic structure of the phrase”) to show that biosemiotic analysis is the only way to attain some sort of ittisāʿ of meanings in this Quranic phrase.