A Syntactic-Semantic Study of Demonstratives in the Glorious Qur’an and their Realization in English

Abstract

Demonstrative pronouns are considered to be determiners used with nouns or instead of nouns to show either distance from or proximity to the speaker, like ‘this’ and ‘that’ in English. English has four demonstrative pronouns: ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’ and ‘those’. Arabic has a richer variety of demonstratives as will be shown in the following sections.The present study aims at exploring the syntactic and semantic functions of demonstratives in English and Arabic and finding out whether the translators of the Glorious Qur’an are successful in rendering demonstratives into English. To achieve these aims the study hypothesizes that translating demonstrative successfully requires resorting to the reliable authentic exegeses and that literal translation is the most successful strategy in translating the Qur’an in general and demonstratives in particular.