Title and Text in Surahs of the Qur’an Starting with Oaths: Semantico-Syntactic Study of Surat Al-‘Adiyat.

Résumé

This paper is divided into two sections. The first section is a theoretical one which examines the concept of ‘title’, its functions, its significance, and its relationship with the Quranic text, which is a complete linguistic discourse that contains many surahs with different titles. These surahs are a group of texts that establish the discourse of the Quran, and each discourse has its own focal point that an author intends to reach. Titles are the most significant focal points that summarize the author’s intention. This is why scholars have studied titles, and they have done so in two ways; either by starting from titles to understand texts or by starting from texts to understand titles.

The second section is a practical one. It examines the linguistic analysis of surahs in the Quran that start with oaths. Those are fifteen surahs which have coherent parts that follow a parallel structure or syntax. The paper studies surat al-‘Adiyat as an example. It examines its parts, and the relationship between its title and text. It also studies its semiology, the contradictory characters in it, and its title which is connected to the text related to the oath and its response. It also discusses the paradigmatic distinction and the binary contrasting pairs on opposite characters in a way that illustrates the deconstruction and construction that semiology adopts in clarifying the deep structure that is found behind the surah’s surface phonological, grammatical, morphological, and semantic structures.

The study emphasizes that lexical interpretations of the surah’s characters is not enough to comprehend the text. This is because studying words in their context is required to comprehend the text. The study also tries to emphasize that surat al-‘Adiyat is comprehensive grammatically in terms of its structure, and oaths, and semantically in regards to its events, characters, and the combination of its parts, all of which construct the meaning behind the surah. The research argues that the surah’s different meanings can be derived from its title, which represents the icon of semiology, as well as the focal point. The paper asserts that the means of textual coherence fulfill their tasks in building a solid text in the surah.