An investigation of the near-synonyms in the Quran: A collocational analysis

This qualitative corpus-based study aimed at investigating whether two pairs of nearsynonym words hold similar or different meanings. To this end, a new method of corpus analysis -collocational analysis- was used to explore the dis/similarity among a number of noun + conjunction + noun (synonym) near-synonyms that were chosen from different chapters from the Holy Quran. The discussions of the examples have revealed that near-synonyms in the Quran have entirely different meanings. It was shown through their co-occurrence adjacency where each lexeme appears to carry an independent meaning from its company. More specifically, every single word has its semantic meaning and features in comparison to its neighboring lexeme. Analyzing the co-occurrence of near-synonym pairs in the Holy Quran revealed that they are distinct and each lexeme has its own meaning where it cannot be used interchangeably with its neighboring. Thus, we claim here that there are no two lexemes in the Holy Quran carrying the same meaning, especially those words that collocate with each other. Such an analysis could be useful for translators in which they can have a better understanding of the precise meaning of the closely related words.