Lexical intensification, cumulation and repetition in the translations of the Qur'an: (Strengthening meaning, Cumulation and tautology, Parallelism and polysyndet)

Abstract

The Quran is the last written record of metaphysical communication between God and man. It has definitely remained inexhaustible literary base for all types of scientists and researchers, linguists in particular. Due to the uniqueness of form and fear of possible sin or blasphemy that translation could cause, even the top notch translators were hesitant to work on “holy
books” translations.

The study of lexical intensification, cumulation and repetition deals and treats translation equivalents at lexical semantic level of language structure through the three previously mentioned semantic features. In the process, rich inventory of the corpus as well as bibliographies has been used; the existing literature has been analyzed while the data has been correlatively and comparatively represented through four different translations of the Quran into the Bosnian language directly and reliably from the original in Arabic.

The work aims to initiate lexicological and general semantic research in the field of sacred text translations, which are grammatically interesting, and above all stylogenetic.

The task was to observe, extract and define examples of intensification, cumulation and repetition that translators have used in their own way, and to describe or reinterpret the theoretical principles of lexical semantics of the Bosnian language using examples from the corpus. When Almighty God wants to eliminate any doubt in the message or to emphasize its importance or verify the contents which that verse (sentence) transfers, He uses reinforced meanings, intensification or corroboration. In
the Arabic language intensification is a way of achieving a stronger meaning of a sentence and it is realized at different levels of language structure.

The Quran in many places and in many verses uses meaning reinforcement of the individual parts of a sentence. Such reinforcement can be of verbal or semantic character.

There is one example of each lexical semantic specificity in the abstract as is the case with the following example of intensification, which we have comparatively analyzed in translations:

(2:83) – and their parents, and neighbours, and the orphans, and the poor (BK, EC, MM); no intensifiers with ED; we notice an example of gradation here. Abbreviations used behind the citations refer to the authors of translations, e.g. BK-Besim Korkut.

Cumulation belongs to the figures of classical rhetoric, which obtains its reaffirmation in modern literary poetics and linguistics. The difference between cumulation and tautology is in the fact that in tautology the same thought is repeated, whereas in cumulation thoughts and expressions share similar meaning. These two figures are very close, but not identical. Tautology would be a cumulation of linguistic signs with reduplicated meaning, while cumulation is reduplication of only one
part of the meaning of the semantic component. This is confirmed by the following example:

(2:40) / in one verse cumulation of first person pronouns Mine, We, I, Our, Me (BK, EK, and ED); with MM repetition and Myself, and Myself.

In our corpus, repetition (ar. al-muqabala) of lexis is present a lot. When an object or a lexical unit receives special importance and wants the reader to draw attention to it, it is being repeated. There are repetitions in the structure of one testimony, one paragraph, some are present on a larger scale, and some are transferred from paragraph to paragraph, whereas some throughout the whole unit.

For example, (2:123) – when nobody…when neither of whom…when to no one…and when they…(BK); only MM introduces the linker nor after the first use of when.

It is important to point out that we have explored the supernatural text, unparalleled, incomparable, and amazing in all aspects of the language, the text that refuses to be accepted as art.

Let us also mention that the descriptive method has been applied in this paper, which we used for detailed explanation and description, and using examples from the corpus we have confirmed certain linguistic phenomena applicable to our research. Subsequently, the contrastive analysis has been used along with one of the most important methods without which it would
be impossible to talk about the style of the Quran as a holistic phenomenon. That method is the lexical stylistic method which was used to show the uniqueness of the style of the Quran through semantic figurativeness. The work opens up new horizons for the study of the provenance of religious texts.