Cohesive substitution in the Quran

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Abstract

This article describes the use of cohesive substitution in the Quran. In Halliday and Hasan's model of cohesion, this term refers to the replacement of one syntactic item by another; this article asks several questions in this regard: How is cohesive substitution realized in the Quran? What items does it replace? Why is it used? The study finds that there are only a few cases of cohesive substitution in the Quran, and the nominal and verbal substitution operate in the Quran as they do in English. In that language, the forms one and the same are employed for nominal substitution. In the Quran the forms ahad "one" (sg. masc.), ihdá "one" (sg. fem.) and mitlu dalika "the same" can be considered equivalent to the English form one and the same. Verbal substitution in Arabic is realized by the verb yaf'alu "he will do," "he does" (and is not followed by the anaphoric pronoun dalika "that"), replacing only the verb without its complement. No occurrences of clausal substitutions were found because usually variations of anaphoric reference (e.g., dalika "that" or ka-dalika "like that") were used instead. From a pragmatic viewpoint, cohesive substitution is used to prevent repetition of the same word found in the immediately preceding clause.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)41-52
Number of pages12
JournalLingua Posnaniensis
Volume59
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Dec 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Yehudit Dror, published by Sciendo.

Keywords

  • Quran
  • anaphoric pronoun
  • cohesion
  • substitution

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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