Cohesive Devices in the Short Suras of the Glorious Quran

Abstract:

This study tackles cohesive devices in the short suras of the Glorious Quran which connect sentences and clauses or text relations that contribute to the text’s unity or texture beyond intra-sentence relations or ties. It is mainly based on Halliday and Hasan’s model of cohesive devices in English, in terms of both grammatical and lexical cohesive devices. Special attention is given to differences between English and Arabic that have been mentioned in the literature regarding the use of cohesive devices. Ten short suras of the Glorious Quran are analyzed for this purpose.   The study confirms that the pattern of cohesive devices found in the data diverges from Halliday’s model in some respects. The main cohesive devices in the short suras of the Glorious Quran are the rhyming sound unit, reference, repetition, conjunction, and synonymy. The least used devices are substitution, ellipsis, hyponym and antonym.