Discourse functions of opposition in Classical Arabic: The case in Ḥadīth Genre

This article offers a new perspective on Arabic antonymy ‘al-ṭibāq’ and opposition ‘al-muqābala’ in the Ḥadīth discourse by remodeling these two phenomena in Classical Arabic and developing a provisional typology of their discourse functions (e.g., co-ordination, sub-ordination, interrogation, comparison) in terms of their syntactic frameworks or environments (e.g., X and Y, if X then Y, X or Y?, X more/less [adj] than Y). These syntactic frames function as parametrical triggers of both canonical and non-canonical oppositions in the prophetic discourse. The provisional typology employs quantitative and qualitative approaches, adding substantial data-driven changes and introducing new data-based categories. Two full datasets have been manually mined and collected from the two major Ḥadīth collections, then tested quantitatively and qualitatively against the remodeled typology.¹ Results demonstrate that the syntactic environments hosting canonical antonyms trigger oppositions between other items that are (non)canonical opposites and non-opposites and that represent a variety of (in)human, (in)animate and (in)concrete entities. The proposed typology may serve as a new toolkit for investigating aspects of lexical-semantic opposition in other discourses and languages.