Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the linguistic phenomenon of Acoustic Prepositional Deletion (APD) ( نزع الخافض سماعيا , nazʿi al-khāfiḍ smaʿyan) in the Quran. It mainly addresses deleting thepreposition إلى , ilā from some verses of the Quran despite being preceded by an intransitive verb. Thestudy applies the perspective of Cognitive Linguistic (CL) theory and its relevant approaches to the analysis of the data included. Construction Grammar (CxG) is mainly used to examine to what extent the (non)existence of an element (i.e. preposition) of a particular construction may lead to the alternation of the spatial relationships existing between its elements, and what consequences may appear due to the manipulation of the existing relationships. The study finds that APD results in new partially or totally different, opposite or negative, abstract or manner spatial relationships between the construction entities which in turn result in different semantic conceptualization of these relationships. It also finds out that the degree of loyalty to the spatial scene in the Target Text (TT) varies from partially loyal to disloyal. This validates Croft’s (2001-2017) hypothesis that meaning is both construction and language specific.
Highlights
Prepositions play a vital role in the construction and inferences of meaning as linguistic devices in a language due to their relational function
A similar notion is presented by Sibawayh (1988) and Abāḍī (2005) with one slight difference which indicates that the preposition might designate a sense of ‘ending’ where the end includes the first limit and the last one, but does not allow exceeding it
In the first example above, it was found that there is a clear function of the deletion of the preposition which is not for example termination/destination, or other regular function, but rather a sort of relationship that is expressed directly without the need to use a preposition, where asking for guidance, direction, and stability is profiled with the conceptual metaphor ASKING FOR MORE GUIDANCE = LONGING FOR MORE PREVALIGE
Summary
Prepositions play a vital role in the construction and inferences of meaning as linguistic devices in a language due to their relational function. Their analysis has always been considered a hard task because of their polysemous nature and their meaning dependency on the context they are used in. Quirk et al (1985), state that prepositions have been in the core of a huge variety of linguistic studies for the purpose of investigating them as semantic and syntactic constituents. Ryding (2005), states that they may be used in abstract or figurative ways Their combination with the verbs, according to Langacker (1987), is an indication of the speakers’ ability to recognize the contribution of the single component to the whole. This notion points to what semantically motivates the process of selecting a particular preposition to combine with the verb (Imran Ho-Abdullah, 2010)
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