Does Ellipsis Really Exist in the Qurʾān?

Abstract

Departing from Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study, which represents preliminary findings, asserts that ellipsis in the Qurʾān, as a grammatical cohesive device, does not tend to occur more frequently. Arabic linguistics, for its part, has approached ellipsis and continues from exclusive intra-sentence relations governed by syntactic rules. Understood as such, ellipsis doesn’t contribute to the cohesiveness of text― a notion absent in the Arabic linguistic tradition. To compensate for the ellipsis’s contribution to text, the Qurʾān employs two other strategies; the cohesive relationship of Reference, and stylistic techniques. The study shows that SFL-based ellipsis analysis is more productive and useful for understanding the mechanisms of text building elements than the syntactic approach. However, more research is required to get a more thorough knowledge of ellipsis in the Qurʾān, which will eventually contribute to the ellipsis theory in the Arabic language.