Grammatical Issues Integrated with Quranic Exegesis and Their Impact on Meaning: A Critical Study of the Commentary on Sūrat al-Nisāʾ

Abstract

Abstract This study focuses on the grammatical content of six Quranic exegeses dating from the fourth/tenth to the seventh/thirteenth centuries (see section 1.3). The idea of exploring grammatical aspects of Quranic exegeses is not new in modern research, yet a complete analysis based on a large corpus devoted to the collection, classification, and analysis of the grammatical content of Quranic exegeses is still lacking. This study is limited to an examination of commentaries on sūrat al-nisāʾ. In these, two types of grammatical comments can be distinguished. The first are “formal comments”, in which the commentators conduct a morphological and/or syntactical analysis of various components. Such comments usually include an explicit grammatical term, and most of these have been addressed by traditional grammarians. The second type are “functional comments”. These concern issues that are less common in classical grammatical descriptions, such as agreement, coherence, pragmatics, and other related matters. Usually in these types of comments, no syntactical term is mentioned, although such explanations make important grammatical contributions.