Quranic Studies and Islamic Culture

Determination of Quranic verse-final pauses'( fawāṣil) phonetic model based on phonological distinctive features

Authors

Farzaneh Tajabadi
Aliyeh Kord-e Zafaranlu Kambuziya

Associate professor, Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modarres University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract
The rhythm resulted from the combination and established order of consonants and vowels in each word, verse and chapter (surah) of the Holly Qur'an, is an expression of the literary miracle of this divine book. Among different factors which shape this sense of rhythm, phonological  harmony and parallelism of  Quranic verse-final pauses (fawāṣil), play an outstanding role. The present research aims to investigate the phonological patterns of last phoneme in Quranic verse-final pauses (fawāṣil) based on Arabic phonemic inventories, in order to find is there a model for this phonological parallelism and if yes, how we can use it to distinguish between Makki and Madani surahs.The data are collected from The Quranic Arabic Corpus of Leeds University by using text data mining method. The discussion concludes that the clusters which consist of all last final phonemes of fawāṣil of each surah, don't express a unique pattern for phonological parallelism. However, binary clusters that include last phonemes of first and final verses' fawāṣil of each surah show peculiar character in regard to the place and manner of articulation of their members which can be used as a criteria to distinguish between Makki and Madani surahs.

Keywords

rhythm
phonological parallelism
verse-final pauses (fawāṣil)
phonological distinctive features
phonological model
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  • Receive Date 24 December 2017
  • Revise Date 21 February 2018
  • Accept Date 09 April 2018

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