Toward a New Typology of Al-Ṭibāq “Antonymy” in Qur’anic Arabic

Building on novel categories of antonymy in English semantics, this study undertakes a fresh typological analysis of the Qur’anic ṭibāq by categorizing its textual functions in the Qur’anic discourse and developing eleven lexicosyntactic categories thereof. It was found that the discourse functions of antonymy developed in previous studies of English, Swedish, Japanese, Serbian, Romanian, and Chinese are replicable in Qur’anic Arabic, but with nuances in the syntactic frames and subcategories. The coordinated ṭibāq is preponderant, proving to be particularly useful for patterning the Qur’anic text and guiding its exegesis. It was also shown that the syntactic frames act as triggers for canonical antonyms and binary oppositions between (non)human, (in)animate, and (in)concrete entities, the proper understanding of which can lead to an orthodox interpretation of the Qur’an. The provisional typology proposed in this study may serve as an analytical tool kit and a linguistic guideline for Qur’anic interpretation and translation.