Abstract
This paper explores the extent to which the Qur'anic discourse helps realize social variation from both a pragmatic and stylistic perspective. It theorizes that individuals coming from different functional and dysfunctional families often show a good degree of dissimilarities in their responses and behaviors. Thus, the paper aims to check whether these individual differences are reflected in the Noble Qur'an or not. It is also intended to examine mechanics of linguistic variability in the holy Script of Islam to mirror the various individual proclivities and tendencies. Data collection has been carried out through a concordance process in which certain key words in context (KWIC) related to kinship, such as brother, father, mother and clan, and family-resemblance categories, such as Jews, Christians, believers and Sabians, are listed in a corpus. The study applies a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to the data collected. Therefore, it builds on Van Dijk's (1998) model of critical analysis at the syntactic, semantic and schematic levels. It has been found that the Qur'anic discourse mirrors variation among individuals from a stylistic, pragmatic and socio-pragmatic perspectives. Mechanics of linguistic variation in performance has included mainly shifting language styles and functions, re-ordering the relevant arguments in harmony with the context under discussion, qualifying speech to tell the truth and (accordingly) to address norms of polite address, and selecting certain figures of speech that help ideas to flow easily and beautifully.
Highlights
The present study fits into cognitive linguistics, as it describes how language interacts with cognition and how language forms our thoughts (Robinson and Ellis, 2008) [18]
It has been found that the Qur'anic discourse processes the behaviors, practices and tendencies of people belonging to one family differently on both the pragamtic and stylistic levels
The holy Script of Islam selects and uses specific language processes and functions, including mainly style fluctuation, predicate and argument contextualization and de-contextualization, word-order alternation and deletion, ostensive definition, and relevant conclusion as mechanics to help realize sociolinguistic variations among the target members and categories under discussion. Among these mechanics, shifting the style allows for loading specific meanings related to the behaviors of people
Summary
In modern denotational theories of meaning, scholars are more interested in what is said in one natural language. Central to the interface between lexical semantics and lexical syntax is, argument structure. Grimshaw (1990) claims that argument structure is quite structured [1]. This structure often conceals some eminence relations among arguments that reflect their thematic and aspectual characteristic features and properties. These prominence relations are in concord with a new theory of external arguments with far-reaching consequences for the syntactic behaviors of the predicate as well as the nature of cross-categorical variation and language change in argument structure
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