Polysemy of the Roots "/r//b//v/; /r//b//w/" in the Holy Quran: a Literary Analysis of Mergers and Splits of Stems

Muslim scholars have from far past paid attention to key exegetical role of "semantic overlap" and "lexical overlap" in interpreting religious scriptures. With the emergence of modern semantics, linguists have had a similar concern labeled with terms "polysemy" and "homonymy" and this made them to introduce more reliable methods to make distinctions between these classifications relying on diachronic historical studies of changes of lexicons. Applying these new linguistic methods, the present study made an attempt to analyze the polysemy of the roots "/r//b//v/" and "/r//b//w/" in the Holy Quran, and discuss mergers and splits of the roots. Presenting linguistic evidence, this study could reveal mergers in the lexicons derived from these roots, ignored by previous scholars. Furthermore, based on the same evidence, some semantic relations proposed in the past were questioned as a result of this research.