Exploring Discourse Markers in the Noble Quran: Some Verbal Clues that Facilitate Logical Hedging, Linguistic Interaction and Language Politeness
Sami Al-Heeh*, Mahmoud Itmeizeh
Citation :Sami Al-Heeh, Mahmoud Itmeizeh,Exploring Discourse Markers in the Noble Quran: Some Verbal Clues that Facilitate Logical Hedging, Linguistic Interaction and Language Politeness International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature 2017,5(12) : 1-25.
From a pragmatic perspective, this small-scale study investigates the discourse markers used in the Quranic discourse. It aims to conceive some bare minimum words namely ('an, 'in, la:, li-, ma: and ha-) as discourse markers. Traditionally, Arab linguists often classified them as extra words because of their minute word-formations to convey certain meanings. Based on more recent denotational and morphological theories, the study theorizes that they must be morphemes, i.e. smallest units of words that carry meaning, sustained on the discourse level of some specific contexts for some pure linguistic reasons. The study uses key word in context (KWIK) for data collection. It applies a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to the data collected. It uses Fairclough's 2010 and Van Dijk's 1998 models of analysis on the syntactic, semantic and schematic level. It has been found that the minimal words are unlikely to be extraneous or erroneous. They constitute an important linguistic element of some discourses negotiating contexts characterized by hypersensitivity. Stylistically and pragmatically, the Quranic discourse utilizes them schematically to meet the requirements of logic for hedging, to satisfy the needs of participants for linguistic interaction and to show inclinations of people to language politeness. Finally, the study implicates for research on pragmatics and translation studies.