The Rhetorical Purposes of Tense Shift in Qur'anic Verses with Reference to English

Abbas Dawood, Mahmood

	The Rhetorical Purposes of Tense Shift in Qur'anic Verses with Reference to English
Journal of Tikrit University for the Humanities
Article 1, Volume 15, Issue 11, 2008, Pages 560-575
Author
Mahmood Abbas Dawood
Abstract
ABSTRACT The Glorious Qur’an maintains the highest possible standard of rhetoric in its speech, to the extent that it is impossible to find its parallel in human works. Muslims consider the Qur'an as miraculous and inimitable in that the Qur'anic text cannot be reproduced in another language or form. Furthermore, an Arabic word may have a range of meanings depending on the context, to the extent that not a single word in the Qur'an can be exchanged for another without affecting the depth of meaning conveyed by the original word. This paper deals with one of these miraculous characters, that lies in the different forms of verbs that shift from a tense to another within the same verse. The paper is presented in three main sections, an introduction and conclusions. The introduction summarizes the views of Muslim writers and exegeses on such linguistic phenomenon, which they call Iltifat. The first section discusses the tense shift in English preceded by definitions of some basic terms. The second section deals with the occurrence of the present verb after the past tense in the same verse, giving sufficient examples from the glorious Qur'an and shedding light on the rhetorical purposes behind such uses. The third section discusses the reversing of the present –future tense, where the past tense is used to express present or future. The purposes and the contexts of such uses are clarified in this section. At the end of the paper, there are the major findings that the researcher has reached at.

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