Qur’anic Semantic Markedness: A Translation and Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

Abstract: The ostensible unmarked meaning opted for by translators of the Qur’anic discourse is the commonsensical choice in many contexts. The drowned or marked meaning of some expressions is equally key and must be surfaced to the readership. Further, deciding on the more common sense of a word and leaving out the less common one usually results in a distortion of the intended meaning in certain Qur’anic renditions although it might not in other ones. Hence, the present study aims to accentuate some aspects of the Qur’anic semantic markedness at four levels of analysis: the lexical level, the space deictic level, the prepositional level, and the schematic level where a marked word is chosen to serve the formal patterning of the surahs. Markedness has been fully researched but, to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, no research has been conducted on or dedicated to the Qur’anic semantic markedness. This study, therefore, is a novel contribution to the Qur’anic translation as it unconventionally tackles the concept of Qur’anic semantic markedness.