Mechanics of Sociolinguistic Variation and Pragma-stylistic Inclination in the Qur'anic Discourse

This paper explores the extent to which the Qur'anic discourse helps realize social variation from both a pragmatic and stylistic perspective. It theorizes that individuals coming from different functional and dysfunctional families often show a good degree of dissimilarities in their responses and behaviors. Thus, the paper aims to check whether these individual differences are reflected in the Noble Qur'an or not. It is also intended to examine mechanics of linguistic variability in the holy Script of Islam to mirror the various individual proclivities and tendencies. Data collection has been carried out through a concordance process in which certain key words in context (KWIC) related to kinship, such as brother, father, mother and clan, and family-resemblance categories, such as Jews, Christians, believers and Sabians, are listed in a corpus. The study applies a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to the data collected. Therefore, it builds on Van Dijk's (1998) model of critical analysis at the syntactic, semantic and schematic levels. It has been found that the Qur'anic discourse mirrors variation among individuals from a stylistic, pragmatic and socio-pragmatic perspectives. Mechanics of linguistic variation in performance has included mainly shifting language styles and functions, re-ordering the relevant arguments in harmony with the context under discussion, qualifying speech to tell the truth and (accordingly) to address norms of polite address, and selecting certain figures of speech that help ideas to flow easily and beautifully.