A LINGUISTIC STUDY OF YAHYĀ IBN SALLĀM'S VIEW ON QUR'ANIC VOCABULARY (original) (raw)

2018, Fourth International Symposium on Rethinking the Qur’ān: Qur’ānic Studies in the First Three Centuries -Ankara

Understanding the meaning of the Qur'anic vocabulary is the first and fundamental step in the interpretation of the Qur'anic text. Numerous works of the Islamic scholars in this field, from the early Islamic centuries till now, are indisputable evidence of this. Yahyā ibn Sallām, a Muslim exegete of the second century AH, is one of the Quranic scholars, who the proximity of his time to the period of Quranic revelation, increases the importance of the methodology of his works in the field of Semantics of the Qur'anic vocabulary. Therefore, in this article, we have studied two of his works reflecting his views on this field; the first work is titled Al-Tasārif, which deals with the issue of Wujūh al-Qur'ān, and the second one is Tafsir. These two works, especially the first one, are full of semantics instances of the Qur'anic vocabulary. There is no doubt that one of the characteristics of the interpretative tradition in the early Islamic centuries, is the domination of narration and its acquired feature that is noticeable in the two previously mentioned works of Yahyā ibn Sallām, especially in his Tafsir. However, it seems that Yahyā ibn Sallām deals with the semantics of the Qur'anic vocabulary in many cases. Accordingly, the aim of the present study is to apply some recognized concepts and terms of semantics to describe and analyze the meaning of Quranic terms in the two aforementioned works, in order to clarify the method used by one of the earliest scholars of Quranic studies in this area. This study shows that he has paid attention to the "context", "etymology", "syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations", "homographs", "hyponymy" and "semantic opposition". In addition, he points to the metaphorical concepts of these terms in the semantic analysis of those Quranic terms belonging to the abstract issues, which reminds the «conceptual metaphors» in modern linguistics.