The Psychological Meaning in the Glorious Quran: Semiotic Communication Approach

Abstract

The mechanisms of the production of various meanings and how they are received by the recipient have been widely discussed in the literature, including the study of usool (principles of jurisprudence), fiqh (jurisprudence), rhetoric and linguistics. The old scholars, particularly those specialized in principles of jurisprudence, paid special attention to the study of meaning with the aim of understanding the intended meanings of religious texts and the jurisdical rulings based on them. In the modern age, the theories of semantics and meaning production have developed considerably. The lexical meaning of a single word often seems easy to grasp, but the various meanings, particularly the psychological ones, generated by the lexical meanings in different contexts, are of the greatest importance to the fixation of certain intended meanings of different texts in the addressee's mind. The following are the most important questions that the present paper raises and attempts to answer, or opens a horizon to answer:-What is a psychological meaning?-Who determines it: the sender, the recipient, or both of them?-Does it differ from one recipient to another? Why?-Can it be controlled and framed like a lexical meaning?-Can some single words carry by themselves "seeds" for psychological meaning, to be used in certain contexts? Or do single words have no effect on the process of psychological meaning generation?