مهدی حبیب اللهی

Muslim exegetes have long sought to discover the wise secrets, rhetorical points, and explicit or implicit messages embedded in the expressions and structures of the Quranic text. In addition to the common methods of using lexicological approaches, Arabic morphology and syntax, ancient Arabic poetry or narrating the exegetical sayings from the prophet''s Companions to literally interpret explicit meanings of Quranic words, they sometimes appealed to intellectual methods in order to extract implicit and implied meanings hidden in some Quranic verses. In modern times, most of these technics and methods have been classified and introduced in various branches of linguistics. One of the relatively new branches of linguistics which concerns inferring implied, and intended meanings out of the utterances is pragmatics. The present study aims at conducting a comparison between the newly developed elements of pragmatics and some of the medieval Quranic commentaries which applied those elements. In this regard, three much discussed elements of presupposition, entailment and conventional implicature have been selected and then a number of old Quranic exegetes in which these three elements have been indirectly used are introduced. The study indicates that Muslim commentators of the medieval era were aware of these technics and extensively used them in their works.

Pragmatics is a field of knowledge that aims to examine and elucidate the primary intentions and meanings of utterances and writings. This discipline, utilizing various linguistic and non-linguistic contexts, seeks to extract the intended meaning of speakers and writers, portraying implicit, figurative, and indirect meanings within sentences. The purpose of this article is to introduce this discipline and its components, such as references, presuppositions, and entailments, and to explore how these components can be employed in the examination of Quranic verses, particularly in elucidating the serious intentions of the Almighty. This research is a qualitative research in which data is collected by library method and analyzed by analytical and citation method. Although many of these components have been scattered throughout the extensive Islamic literature and in various branches of Islamic sciences such as rhetoric, Quranic sciences, interpretation, and the science of principles of interpretation, a comprehensive examination of them from a different perspective can contribute to the interpretation of the Quran and the extraction of some new concepts from its verses.