Meaning Formation Structure in Surah Al-Kafirun as a Literary Text: A Structuralist Approach

The present article is an attempt to discover the order governing the linguistic elements in Surah Al-Kafirun [109]. The question posed is that as a literary text, what linguistic and semantic structures does the Surah Al-Kafirun adopt? This is answered through binary oppositions as well as syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. The study will be a descriptive-comparative one. The first section of the article presents an applied analysis of the structural approach to text study. The second section analyses the Surah Al-Kafirun according to the aforementioned analysis, which shows the text is built up of three main structures based on three main binary oppositions, with the second opposition itself built up of four minor structures based on three minor binary oppositions. One of these minor oppositions has been repeated in the text, once with Positive implications and once with Negative implications. The linguistic elements in the text have been used in such a way that simultaneously divide and join the Surah structures. This occurs both in the semantic representation of the text on the one hand and in morphological, lexical, and syntactic representations on the other. The structural analysis shows how the intended meanings have been presented through paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations in a coherent structure.