فصلنامه پژوهش های ادبی - قرآنی
سال نهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 35، پاییز 1400)

Silence as a communicative action plays a crucial role in different discourses. It is the foundation of language, thinking, and cognition. Silence is the complement to speech and even beyond that. Absent elements have a meaningful presence in the discourse, and highly impress the audience and encourage them to start thinking. The Holy Qur’an, as a rhetorical and literary work, consists of numerous absent and silent elements that incite researchers to discover any new rhetorical hinters by exploring the divine ayahs. In the current study, a descriptive-analytic method was employed to analyze Surah Yusuf at three structural, semantic, and cognitive-pragmatic levels, based on the theory of narrative silence discourse. The study aimed to present a clear answer to the question of silence and its impact in polysemy and in the reading of Surah Yusuf. The findings show that this surah contains three types of silence, indicating the structural and semantic coherence of the divine ayahs of the Qur’an. While condensing the speech, creating plot tension, and delaying the meaning, structural silence provides illustrations, and creates a more tangible atmosphere. The frequent pragmatic silence confirms the purity and innocence of Yusuf. Filling the current gaps with the help of readers' background knowledge, as well as the context, facilitates the esoteric interpretation of the meanings and makes provisions conducive for various interpretations of the divine ayahs.

Cognitive linguistics is one of the newest categories of linguistics that has established a relationship between language and human thought, and includes various theories including conceptual metaphor, image schemas, etc. The theory of image schemas, developed by Lakoff and Johnson, examines the ways in which meaning and perception are derived from and relevant to our physical experience. The human mind understands the meaning of schemas without the need for complex processing and training. In other words, in an image schema, sensory experiences are mapped to conceptual structures, and they can be used to talk about abstract domains. The present descriptive-analytical study aimed to investigate the meaning of image schemas of the Holy Qur’an. For this purpose, using Johnson's theory, the image schemas of Surah As-Saffat were extracted and analyzed. The results indicate that the highest frequency is related to the force schema (53%), and the frequency of the transformational schema (24%) and the spatial schema (23%) are almost the same. This is in line with the purpose of this Surah which is informing about the hereafter and giving a warning to the servants of God. Also, in the spatial schema, the preposition "fi", repeated 15 times, and in the transformational schema, the preposition "ila", repeated in nine cases, had the highest frequency. These schemas have been created to help the readers better understand non-empirical concepts, such as heaven, hell, infidelity, faith, reward and punishment, the power and will of God, and so on.

Designing and introducing models for conducting research based on theoretical perspectives comprise the principles and foundations of descriptive, qualitative, and explorative studies. It is one of the current procedures in discourse and pragmatic studies which are generally based on corpus-based studies. Discourse markers are metalinguistic elements made up of prepositions, coordinators, conjunctions, adverbs, and short sentences. Discourse markers are applied in order to establish relationships between different units of discourse in human communication. The present research aimed to investigate and analyze the most complex, frequent, and effective metalinguistic elements, i.e. discourse markers, on the basis of coherence theory in discourse to explore and discover a discourse monitoring model on the basis of Qur’anic texts. To this end, 6 sections of the Holy Qur’an were randomly selected for the purpose of analysis. The corpus consisted of 16906 words. The analysis of the corpus produced a four plane of talk framework representing four types of discourse relations comprising inference, elaboration, contrast and temporal sequence. Different aspects of the findings were discussed, and different implications for education, research, material development, and lexicography were considered.

A distinctive characteristic of the Qur’anic language is the linguistic deviation that dynamically affects the general structure of the Qur’an. The present study aimed to investigate this linguistic phenomenon in the case of the first fifteen Ajza’ of the Qur’an (totaling 2267 ayahs) based on the viewpoint of Ibn as-Sayegh and the methods he presented for the harmony of ayah endings. This research seeks to, in qualitative and quantitative ways, provide objective and extensional examples of how the Qur’an has represented this linguistic phenomenon. The results indicate that out of the forty deviation patterns proposed by Ya'ish ibn Ali Ibn Sayegh, twenty-five patterns corresponded to 40% of the studied data. Grammatical deviations account for the largest share of changes, and to a much lesser degree, lexical and phonetic variations constitute smaller shares. The most distinctive kinds of deviations are the fronting of jār and majrur, the elimination and tailing of the object, and the selection of the exaggeration form, respectively. In addition, there was no significant relationship between type and frequency of changes and the number of surahs’ ayahs.

Paying attention to the linguistic level of Qur’anic discourse, and accurate explanation of the ayahs are among the essential topics in the field of Qur’anic studies. In contemporary linguistics, recognizing the relationship between words and phrases, as well as evaluating coherence and looking at the whole of what is the result of these relationships, is considered an important principle in understanding the discourse of the text. Therefore, the literary analysis of the Qur’an as a coherent text will not be outside this linguistic principle because the Qur’an-centeredness and the semantics based on the unity of the Qur’anic semantic network play effective parts in discovering the divine meanings and aims of the ayahs of the Qur’an. Therefore, analyzing the linguistic approaches used by the Qur’anic scholars in explaining Qur’anic ayahs is an undeniable necessity. And since the common concern of Allama Tabatabai and Izutsu in explaining and the studying the semantics of Qur’anic words is understanding the meaning and discovering the meaning from within the text, this descriptive-analytical research intends to analyze the commonalities and convergence of literary and linguistic approaches of Izutsu and Allameh in reading divine ayahs and understanding Qur’anic discourse. The results of the present research indicate the emphasis of Allameh Tabatabai and Izutsu on the systematic nature of the Qur’anic language and the explanation of the semantic independence of the Qur’an and the semantic connection between the ayahs so that they consider the understanding of Qur’anic ayahs to be dependent on the text of the Qur’an and the evidence within the text, and believe in the central effect of the monotheistic paradigm in understanding Qur’anic discourse and the interaction of the meanings of words within the text. However, the quantity and quality of using these common principles are different for them. In the field of literature and linguistics, while emphasizing the rhetorical miracle of the Qur’an, they use the internal context of speech and the intertextual relations in discovering the meanings intended by Allah, and implicitly prove the linguistic coherence and worldview of the Qur’an.

 Qur’anic scholars have so far made many efforts to explain the relationship between ayahs of a surah. Although ayahs of a surah may deal with various subjects, all of these subjects are interrelated through cohesive elements that create textual connectedness. One of the major topics of textual linguistics is the textual cohesion theory proposed by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (1976). Cohesive elements refer to a set of syntactic and lexical relations which either connect sentences together or create links between the components of a sentence. The present study aimed to explain the possibility and the extent of applying textual cohesive elements in Surah Luqman using Halliday and Hasan’s Functional Theory. Lexical cohesive elements and relevant subcategories in this surah constitutue the highest number with 316 cases, while syntactic cohesive elements rank second with 139 cases, followed by logical links between sentences having 106 cases. All these elements create a kind of cohesion in the text, connecting the beginnings and endings of the ayahs, thereby helping the reader better perceive the themes. Since one of the main topics of this surah is monotheism, the words “Allah”, “Rab”, and attributes of God have been repeated 29, 2, and 19 times, respectively, and this repetition contributes to the textual cohesion of the surah. The findings show that it possible to apply all the elements of functional textual cohesion in Surah Luqman.