Retrieving Suprasegmental Elements in the Qur'an and Their Relationship to Sentence-Level Meaning

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

• Jamal Talebi Gharegheshlaghi ¹
• Sayed jafar Sadeghi ²

¹ Associate Professor, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran

² Assistant Professor, Department of Theology and Islamic Studies, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran

10.22067/jquran.2025.89970.1749

Abstract

Suprasegmental elements comprise those features that, beyond the lexical level, play a role in determining the speaker’s intended meaning, either by disambiguating among multiple interpretations or by facilitating the accurate comprehension of meaning. Just as meaning can help identify suprasegmental cues, these cues, in turn, can enhance the clarity of meaning. Although the Qur’an has been transmitted to us in written form, as an intentional discourse its meanings can undoubtedly contribute to the recovery of suprasegmental elements within the verses; conversely, understanding and utilizing these elements can play a part in determining the intended meaning. Using a descriptive-analytical method and focusing on three specific suprasegmental features—stress, intonation, and pause—this study examines sentence-level examples from the Qur’an. The findings indicate that these features can help choose the correct interpretation between the two ambiguous possibilities related to a verse. Likewise, based on the meaning of the verse, one can determine the placement of stress at the sentence level, the intonation pattern of the discourse, and the appropriate points for pause and silence. This study is significant in that no prior exegetical or research work has systematically explored the role of suprasegmental elements in determining the intended meanings of Qur’anic verses.

Keywords

• Linguistics
• suprasegmental elements
• stress
• intonation
• pause

Main Subjects

• Quran and Hadith Studies

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