Iltifat, Grammatical Person Shift and Cohesion in the Holy Quran

Abstract

While discourse analyses go back to the second half of 1950s, related researches in the rhetoric field represent initiative interests’ centuries before by Islamic rhetoricians. Among the topics “Iltifat” as the “grammatical person shift in one or a sequence of sentences” has been quite controversial within the area; which considers the discourse participant shift among the speaker, addressee and absentee. Following a brief introduction to the topic of Iltifat, the present paper is aimed to present its common categories and sub-categories, and its importance from the point of discourse analysis, which is then followed by the consideration of possible defective results of the grammatical person shift on cohesiveness of Quran. In preparing the research 20 surahs of the holy book have been randomly selected, which have been analyzed on the basis of the application of an integrative approach of Halliday and Hasan (1976) and De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) towards cohesion. As a result the research demonstrates the holy book’s cohesiveness and the high Quranic usage of reference and specifically personal reference within the grammatical person shift amongst all the cohesive elements that are studied in detail in the paper. The matter is presented together with the 8 resulted subdivisions of Iltifat in Quran on the basis of the research, as follows: grammatical person shift, number shift, person and number shift, number and gender shift, shift in the addressee, function shift, dual Iltifat and finally sequential Iltifat.

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