Semantic Prosody in the Qur’an

Abstract

Semantic prosody refers to lexical items that collocate with semantic classes of words that are either positive or negative. It is the tendency of words to occur in a certain semantic environment. The semantic environment in which words collocate could be positive or negative or sometimes neutral. This phenomenon provides clear pictures of principles of co-selection of words. In addition, it gives a text harmony and cohesion by keeping the discourse together. There has been little work done on collocation and semantic prosody on Arabic. Accordingly, this study participates in shedding the light on the collocational behavior of the Arabic lexical item neighbors, specifically the lexical items in Qur’an. The researcher attempts to answer the following question: Is there semantic prosody in Qur’an? What are the features of this prosody? In other words, do words have a specific semantic behavior such as positive, negative or sometimes neutral? To Answer this question, and with the help of the Qur’anic corpus, the researcher analyses the semantic behavior and the implied attitudinal meanings of four verbs in Qur’an which are: ذاق dhāqa tasted , كَشفَ kashafa removed,مَسَّ massa touched and جَاءَ jāa came.