Title:
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A study of cohesion in Arabic based on Al-Jurjani's theory of Annazm.
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In the last few years the domain of the linguistic inquiry has
been enlarged by recent development of the multidisciplinary
investigation of language as a communicative tool. Earlier
approaches to the study of language concentrated on the
study of the sentence as a basic constituent of language.
Therefore, the notion of discourse did not receive adequate
attention in most of these approaches. Those aspects of
language that make text coherent and are no less important
than grammatical aspects were not dealt with.
The study of language in communication which is called
discourse analysis is concerned with various aspects of
language that describe it In its actual interactional function.
Those main aspects such as textuality, texture and cohesion
have dominated the interest of many discourse practitioners
in western linguistics In recent years. In Arabic linguistics, the
syntactic and semantic signals that link sentences within a
text have not received adequate attention.
In our modest study of cohesion devices In Arabic we
have tried to shed some light on those linguistic features
which participate in connecting text parts. We have taken the
theory of a nna?m which was developed by 'Abd al-Qahir alJurjani
(5 th century AH/l ph century A.D) as the basis for our
display of cohesive devices in Arabic text. We have attempted to show that the anna'4m devices suggested by al-Jurjani are
of crucial relevance in the investigation and description of
certain important characteristics of Arabic text. They are
factors which contribute to the coherence of Arabic text and
tools which facilitate the evaluation of Arabic discourse
coherence.
Cohesion IS displayed through four major devices each of
which constitutes a single chapter in the thesis. Those devices
are attaqdfm wa tta'khfr "fronting and backing", atta'rfJ w a
ttankir "definiteness and indefiniteness", a IIJ a d12J "ellipsis" and
a 1- wa~ 1 wa IJa$l "conjunctionand disjunction". This study is
presented in a manner comparable with Halliday and Hasan's
treatment of Cohesion in English.
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