Morpho Phonemic Patterns in the Prefixed Chapters of the Holy Quran: A Stylistic Approach

Abstract

This is a study of the Prefixed letters in twenty nine chapters of the holy Qur’an known as mystery letters, hur┴f al muqatta‘┐t (cut letters).The study of these letters has always been in vogue; however this study differs from other as it is based on Textual Linguistic approach and application of Stylistic tools. The prefixed letters of the Qur’anic text are first checked for their phonemic constituents. The leading phonemes and their morphemes are then checked in the relevant chapters. As a next step the cohesion among these morphemes is sought with reference to the prefixed letters. This lays the foundation for stylistic analysis which is carried out for sample chapters in Chapter Five. The guiding linguistic theories are descriptive linguistics and cohesive theory of Halliday that use the empirical data in Chapter Four of this thesis for description and analysis. For stylistic analysis Geoffrey Leech’s tripartite model and Widdowson’s pedagogic stylistics have been used. The study provides an introduction to the stylistic methodology of Halliday, Leech and Mike Short used in the analysis explaining how the analysis can be used in the analysis of the Qur'anic textual relations. Detailed stylistic studies of representative Qur'anic chapters and relevant data each with a different set of letters to highlight different features of the methodology have been carried out. This work is a new development which brings to the field of Qur'anic study the fruits of linguistics and stylistic studies, providing a systematic analysis of the Qur'anic chapters with prefixed letters. The findings provide textual links between the prefixed letters and the text of the relevant chapters.