Home Linguistics & Semiotics A tale of two tool(kit)s: from canonical antonymy to non-canonical opposition in the Qur’anic discourse
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A tale of two tool(kit)s: from canonical antonymy to non-canonical opposition in the Qur’anic discourse

  • Hamada Hassanein EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: July 20, 2023

Abstract

A number of discourse functions of canonical antonyms have been quantified and classified in English and across languages, each of which is associated with typical syntactic frames. Taking such a classification of canonical antonymy as an analytical toolkit, (Davies, Matt. 2012. A new approach to oppositions in discourse: the role of syntactic frames in the triggering of noncanonical oppositions. Journal of English Linguistics 40(1). 41–73) quantified and qualified the role of these frames in triggering non-canonical oppositions in English news discourse. Synergizing the provisional typologies of canonical antonymy (Hassanein, Hamada. 2018. Discourse functions of opposition in Classical Arabic: The case in ḥadīth genre. Lingua 201. 18–44; Jones, Steven. 2002. Antonymy: A corpus-based perspective. London and New York: Routledge.) and non-canonical opposition (Davies, Matt. 2012. A new approach to oppositions in discourse: the role of syntactic frames in the triggering of noncanonical oppositions. Journal of English Linguistics 40(1). 41–73), this study has sought to develop a dynamic toolkit for the quantitative and qualitative analyses of non-canonical opposition across Arabic varieties and potentially other languages. The toolkit was tested quantitatively and qualitatively against a dataset of 2125 non-canonical oppositional pairs collected from the Qur’an with reference to the Qur’anic Arabic Corpus. Results showed that the syntactic frames which house a wide range of co-occurring canonical antonyms also house a wider range of non-canonical oppositions in binary and trinary representations of abstract and concrete entities. The role of syntactic frames in the triggering of non-canonical oppositions is quantitatively and qualitatively significant for locating and explicating the ideological repercussions of oppositions towards Qur’an interpretation. It is concluded that a synergy of typologies results in a replicable pathway for analysis.


Corresponding author: Hamada Hassanein, Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Alkharj, Saudi Arabia; and Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: PSAU/2023/R/1444

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to PSAU, Saudi Arabia, and Mansoura University, Egypt, for giving me the support to complete this article. A note of thanks is so due to the editor in chief and anonymous reviewers of PSiCL for reshaping and rephrasing my article.

  1. Research funding: This study is supported via funding from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University project number (PSAU/2023/R/1444).

Appendix 1

Brill’s simple Arabic transliteration system (Version 1.0, 14 December 2010/Pim Rietbroek)

https://brill.com/fileasset/downloads_static/static_fonts_simple_arabic_transliteration.pdf

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Received: 2022-10-01
Accepted: 2023-02-15
Published Online: 2023-07-20
Published in Print: 2023-09-26

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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