Reference in the Glorious Qur'an with Reference to English

Abstract

This study deals with reference, which is one of the semantic relations through grammar. It is a grammatical cohesive device whose function is creating cohesion through combining between utterance and meaning in order to achieve unity of the Qur’anic text, where cohesion is the basic feature for building and forming the text depending on grammatical structures. The problem is embodied in finding the situations of reference in the Glorious Qur’an and revealing how it contributes in creating textual cohesion to achieve the intended benefit and to avoid repetition and redundancy in style. This study aims at specifying to which extent reference contributes in achieving texture feature of the Qur'anic text by linking the parts of one sentence or many sentences with each other to make a text. This study depends on two hypotheses: the first is; only endophoric reference achieves textual cohesion because it works within the text. The second is textual cohesion is more embodied with reference by pronouns especially third person pronoun. The adopted model in this study is Halliday and Hassan (1976) who suggest the types of reference. It consists of five axes. Each of them is dedicated to explain this cohesive device. The first axe deals with the concept of reference. The second axe focuses on the function of reference. The third axe sheds light on the types of reference while the fourth one deals with the articles of reference, where the most important article is reference with pronouns. The fifth axe is a conclusion in which the role of the reference as a cohesive device and a means for economy that leads to avoiding redundancy is clarified.