Lexical Replacement in Quran Motashabehat Based on a Functional Stylistics Approach

Functional stylistics, as a new-found approach, is considered as a system between linguistics and new literary criticism because it considers aesthetic issues, valuation, and judgment and is based on linguistic results. So, in encountering a text world, the stylistic analysis tries to find the unique beauties of the text ordering, it’s integrated totality, and the ability of the text creator. Stylistic change is one of the miraculous features of the Quran language that can be analyzed based on the new linguistic approach. It occurs on different levels of language. The stylistic change is considered on the levels of sound, phoneme, word, sentence, and text. The major aim of this study is to investigate and to analyze the lexical replacement as one of the most important figures of speech in Arabic stylistic change in the Quran and as one of the semantic development factors of text and its solidarity. This figure of speech has been introduced in the words science in the past and sometimes it was mentioned in rhetorical issues. The researcher tries to answer the following questions to analyze the stylistic change of Quran Motashabehat:1. What is the equivalent of stylistic change in rhetoric?
2. What is the position of lexical replacement in the last Quranic studies as one of the features of stylistic change?
3. How does the order of lexical replacement in the Quran cope with expressing meaning and the creator’s purposes?
4. What are the functions of stylistic order of lexical replacement?
2- Theoretical Framework
The stylistics and style works have been considered by researchers and modernists in the last years. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t important in older studies, but this science was indebted to the rhetoric and criticism basics. The modern stylistics has been stablished as a result of linguistic studies of Ferdinand de Saussure and his student Charles Bally in the beginning of the twentieth century. Saussure didn’t pay attention to the speech linguistics, but Bally made big changes in that and coined the term. According to Bally, style appears in a collection of linguistic elements and emotionally effects on a reader or listener. The stylistics duty is to survey the effective value of regular elements. One of the most important kinds of stylistics is the functional stylistics theory. This theory has a functional approach to meanings and experiences. The functional stylistics is based on attention to the meanings, language functions, surveying its structure in relation with language context factors, and interpersonal and social meanings. This theory emerged in contrast tothe formalist stylistics in the late 1970s by trending to the functional stylistics. Trending of stylistics to functional science was largely affected by methods of analyzing language functions especially the functional pattern of Halliday which is really acceptable named functional semantic linguistics or functional linguistics.
According to Halliday, you can change the formal state of a text, either in an oral or a written form. You can use it for an activity (like teaching language to students) or for expressing a lecture. This capability returns to the flexibility of language and its flowing nature. This is a normal feature of language.
In fact, functional semantic linguistics of Halliday is based on surveying the application of language, or language analysis in the context. . Based on this point of view, a language selection will be functional and meaningful, if it is used in a context, a social position or a culture. A functional analyzer intends to explain the semantic function of grammatical, functional, and semantic elements. He surveys the language elements and their structure to explain the semantic function.
The researchers believe that one of the stylistic and structural features of the Quran, as a great sample of eloquent text, is its varied surface structure and continuous deep structure. This study, by using the descriptive analysis method and functional stylistics approach, sets the stylistic change as the first step of reading Quran motashabehat, and considers the structural issue of lexical replacement in three levels: noun, verb, and letter.
One of the most significant results of this study is establishing a link among the rhetoric, traditional science of words, and new linguistic issues, providing a new look to eltefat and the issue of synonyms and derivations in rhetoric and words science. We can also refer to the defamiliarization, highlighting, and creating artistic ambiguity as the most important rhetorical functions of stylistic ordering related to the lexical replacement as the main objective of the study. This figure of speech causes the lexical cohesion of text by developing its meaning. So, it can be considered as a factor of lexical cohesion in functional theory of Halliday and Hasan, and look at lexical cohesion as one of its other rhetorical functions.
This paper offers a linguistic-stylistic analysis of verses that have a similar structure, but are stylistically different, and states the reason of style change in the Quran samples. It sees the aforementioned issue as a creative use of language facilities. It also considers the relation of text and context in the light of syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis, and sees the stylistic variety of the Quran as a factor of semantic development and lexical cohesion. It also shows the hidden semantic subtleties in mentioned verses. It is worth mentioning that some issues like structure knowledge, changing the point of view, changing the state, word order, word form, and … are some samples of stylistic change in the Arabic language of the Quran. They are suggested to be analyzed based on functional stylistics theory.