Tasrif in the Quranic Story of Creation in the Light of Halliday's Textual Meta-function

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Abstract

This bipartite paper examines the function of Tasrif in the Quranic story of creation in the light of Halliday's textual meta-function. First, the Quranic concept of Tasrif as a field in Elm-al Maani (semantics of syntax), and its relation to systemic linguistics is introduced and reviewed. Then, through review of literature, it is referred to givenness hierarchy, empathy degree, point of view and topic maintenance. Then, in the light of Halliday's textual meta-function, topicalisation and the information structure of discourse are analyzed in the Quranic stories of creation; in fact, textual meta-function is structured in such a well-formed style that, though the meanings and phrases are repetitive, the presentation of information seems to be demanding; this is the same as Tasrif: presenting the repetitive information in a new style.

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