Antonym Sequence in Qur’anic Arabic: An Emically Etiological Approach

Abstract

This article etiologically examines which principles pattern and govern antonym sequences in the Qur’anic discourse and why antonymous pair members are prone to a particularly regular order in the Qur’an. To conduct a rigorous analysis, the article builds on Jones’s (2002) analytic toolkit for antonym sequence (Chapter 8, 120-137) and tests it on a dataset manually collected from the Qur’an (1420 antonymous pairs). The toolkit accounts for antonym order in language use according to sequence rules which include morphology, positivity, magnitude, chronology, gender, phonology, idiomaticity, frequency, and markedness. The results showed that most of these rules are retrievable and replicable across Qur’anic Arabic, with, however, both quantitative and qualitative variations due to the peculiarly idiosyncratic nature of the Qur’an. Given that not all these sequential rules are applicable, new ones were developed: context, end-rhyme, and distance. The general conclusion is that Qur’anic antonym sequences are ruled by rigorous principles that are sometimes overruled for teleological reasons.