درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

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.

In reciting the verses of the Holy Qur’ān, making pauses at appropriate places is one of the important issues of Tajwid, neglecting which can potentially distort the meanings of the verses and reverse their intended purpose. The present study seeks to analyze how translators have dealt with the concept of inappropriate pause by investigating four English translations of the Holy Qur’ān through answering the following questions: Has the concept of inappropriate or impermissible pause been observed in the English translations of the Holy Qur’ān? Is it possible to express the concept of inappropriate pause using English punctuation? If yes, is it possible to achieve a standard to convey the concept of inappropriate pause? If not, how can this gap be filled? Through a comparative analysis of all 68 cases of inappropriate pause in the Holy Qur’ān and their corresponding translations into English, it seems that English lacks equivalent punctuation to convey the concept of inappropriate pause. Based on the obtained results, it can be concluded that colon is the most appropriate punctuation in English to convey the concept of inappropriate pause. However, the findings of this research show that the translators used commas in 43.7% of the verses with impermissible pauses. The authors presented a “standards table” by examining the function of English punctuation marks, and by observing the approach taken by the translators when facing an inappropriate pause, a “descriptive table” was also presented to illustrate these observations. Then, considering the relationship between these two tables, the closest English punctuation mark for conveying the concept of inappropriate pause was introduced.