Understanding the Qurʾān textuality: a preliminary SFL-based analysis of the Qurʾān as text

Abstract

This study aimed to show that the Qurʾān, irrespective of its religious foundations, is a text, like any other text. As such it has a texture (textuality), a feature shared by all texts, which defines it as being text. Textuality (texture), which gives a text its text-ness, is a product of a network of semantic ties and relations working inside text rendering it meaningful. Viewed from Systemic Functional Linguistic perspectives, these semantic relations are realized by text internal forces called cohesive devices. These devices are of two kinds: grammatical (of reference, ellipsis, and conjunction), and lexical (of reiteration and collocation). The Qurʾān, in creating its text (s), employs both these devices with varying degrees of contribution to its cohesion.