A Linguistic Survey on Discourse Connectives across Mecca vs. Medinna Suras

Year 2015, Volume: 36 Issue: 3, 1425 - 1438, 13.05.2015

Arezu Molavı Vardanjanı

Abstract

Abstract. This discriptive analysis article seeks to investigate the discourse connectives inside and between verses of some Meccan vs Medinan suras. Since Arabic language has no punctuation mark, linguists pay much attention to discourse connectives in various stylic-semantic and functional levels mostly because of their multifunctional meanings that leads to different annotations of suras. Therefore it seems that paying attention to formal vs semantic signals as well as stylistic variations can be helpful to distinguish Meccan vs Medinan suras.

Results show that the linking words وَ, ثُم, الا, فَ and اِذا have the most frequency in both Mecca and Medina suras. Besides, the discourse connectives in Mecca and Medina verses are usually occurred in initial and middle positions, which concerning the Mecca verses, they are mostly applied in initial position, while they typically appear in the middle position in Medina ones. This issue can be justified given the length of Medina verses compared with Mecca verses.

Keywords

Text linguistics, discourse connectives, Mecca/ Medina suras

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