SEMANTIC PROSODY OF BENEFICENT IN PICKTHALL’S RENDERING OF THE QURANIC TEXT

Abstract

This study aims to examine the semantic prosody of the Divine Name Beneficent (al-Raḥmān) in Marmaduke Pickthall’s English translation of the Qur’an, with particular attention to the interaction between evaluative prosody (EP) and discourse prosody (DP). Grounded in Sinclair’s Extended Lexical Unit (ELU) framework, a mixed-methods corpus-based approach was adopted. Collocational analysis was conducted using MI³ statistics within a 5L–5R span, which identified three significant collocates: Merciful, One, and Say. The resulting evaluative prosody of Beneficent was uniformly favourable (100%). A Bayesian posterior predictive test confirmed that this outcome is unlikely to have occurred by chance. At the discourse level, thematic coding of concordance lines, supported by tafsīr, revealed recurring prosodies of invocation, obedience, and rejection of attributing offspring to Allah, with invocation statistically overrepresented. The integration of evaluative and discourse prosodies demonstrates that the semantic prosody of the Beneficent is favourable and operates as a theological directive that calls for supplication, recognition of divine sovereignty, and devotional obedience. These findings suggest that semantic prosody in sacred texts cannot be confined to collocational behaviour alone but must be understood as a multi-layered phenomenon shaped by both lexical and discourse environments. By highlighting the dominant role of the node in determining prosodic colouring, the study contributes to corpus linguistics and Qur’anic translation studies, while also offering a methodological framework for future comparative analyses of the Asma ul Husna across translations.