Abstract
The present study aims to analyse reference, as a cohesive device, in some of the Qurʾānic narratives of Abraham and Moses in ten suras. The study is based on, and limited to, HALLIDAY & HASAN’s concept of cohesion as a semantic relationship realized through grammatical and lexical devices. Such cohesive role of reference is implicitly treated and discussed within the topic of pronouns antecedents in the Arabic linguis-tic tradition. Reference resources in the Qurʾān are diverse but the scope of this study was confined to only the personal and demonstrative components of reference. The analysis showed that personal reference (of the third person forms) was the most frequently used in these narratives. Its salient features, of multiple referents and cumulative effect, contributed to the economy of language use and finally enabled the cohe-sion of the text. The demonstrative reference was less frequent, yet it provided, through its function of connecting various text parts, an additional contribution to the narratives’ cohesion. In general, reference, as one element of the textual metafunction, has played a major role in the text creation in terms of cohesion and coherence.Key words: Reference, Cohesion, Qurʾānic narrative, Systemic Functional Linguistics
Highlights
The focus of this paper is exclusively on one resource of cohesion viewed from, and based on, HALLIDAY & HASAN’s 1976 Cohesion in English. It is an exploration of how reference, a grammatical cohesive device, contributes to building cohesion and coherence in the Qurānic text of these narratives
Though cohesion is realised by lexico-grammatical devices, it is constructed semantically in that “it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text”
On studying ellipsis in a good deal of Qurānic narratives from an SFL perspective based on HALLIDAY & HASAN’s Cohesion in English (1976), we found that its role, in the text cohesion, was somewhat not clear
Summary
The focus of this paper is exclusively on one resource of cohesion (i.e., reference) viewed from, and based on, HALLIDAY & HASAN’s 1976 Cohesion in English It is an exploration of how reference, a grammatical cohesive device, contributes to building cohesion and coherence in the Qurānic text of these narratives. Text refers principally to any stretch of language in use, “of whatever length, that does form a unified whole” (HALLIDAY & HASAN 1976: 1). This definition makes explicit that text is not a grammatical (structural) unit, like a sentence or a clause where size matters; “most texts extend beyond the confines of a single sentence” (ibid.: 7). “any piece of language that is operational, functioning as a unity in some context of situation, constitutes a text” (id. 1976: 293)
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