Entailment

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.

One of the key aspects of structural semantics is the consideration of the issue of signification that paying attention to the types of denotative, implicative, and entailment significations is a strategy for discovering the meanings of words. The present study aims to translate the word "Ummī" based on its denotative significations and to present the meanings and interpretations of translators and commentators that are often based on entailment signification. It also seeks to refute their theories based on other verses and provide a new meaning. Accordingly, it begins by stating the primary meaning of the root "Umm," and based on that, it interprets all the roots of this word in terms of denotative signification. It then views the meaning of "Ummī" as illiteracy or other interpretations as entailment signification, which reflect a certain influence of the translators’ prior theological backgrounds, thereby hindering their ability to convey the original meaning of the word effectively. However, based on the denotative signification of the word "Ummī," meaning "Original," this meaning is evident in all its derivatives and aligns more closely with the root of the word. Also, based on the text and context, it is more consistent with sentences and phrases than other meanings.