The Grammatical and Explanatory Function of Al-Waqf in the Holy Quran: A Syntactic and Semantic Study on Juz’u ‘Amma.

Abstract

The study focuses on the role of al-waqf (pause, in English) in clarifying and interpreting the meaning of all constituents in complete uttered sentences. Such pauses occurring at some parts of speech in a whole sentence are sometimes oblique, resulting in different or unintended meanings. Some pauses are found to have a direct influence on the semantic roles interpreted by the syntactic and functional dependencies in between constituents. The case of pauses and its effect on meaning was illustrated by analyzing the last one out of 30 parts of the holy Quran. The findings showed the extent to which the pauses between the constituents influenced the intended meanings of verses, causing a sense of incompleteness and ambiguity, as opposed to the non-stops which were found to convey to the exact meanings/senses.