THE MULTIPLE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE PRONOUN ULA IKA IN THE QUR'AN

Dror, Yehudit (2020) THE MULTIPLE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE PRONOUN ULA IKA IN THE QUR'AN. ACTA ORIENTALIA ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARUM HUNGARICAE, 73 (1). pp. 47-66. ISSN 0001-6446

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Abstract

Demonstrative pronouns may function as deictic or anaphoric pronouns. The demonstrative pronoun 'ula ika in Arabic is the focus of this paper. It is argued that in the Qur'an, besides being an anaphoric/resumptive pronoun, which primarily functions as the syntactic subject, it has three additional functions: (1) as a resumptive pronoun of the left-dislocation construction, helping in retrieving the predicate, which usually consists of a short clause following a 'heavy' subject. (2) Possibly it has the same function as damir al-fast, 'separation pronoun'-namely, 'ula ika occurs in a simple sentence where it separates a definite subject and a definite predicate. It also occurs between subject and predicate, while both are constructed as relative clauses, and between a 'heavy' subject and indefinite predicate. (3) As a number marker in conditional clauses that are headed by the conditional particle man, and two kinds of number agreement are exhibited in the clause: singular and plural. ula 'ika in this case marks the transition from the grammatical-number feature associated with man to the notional number of man.

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