Marked word order in the Prophet's Hadith and its Arabic translation : a pragmatic functional approach

Abstract EN

This paper sheds light on an important rhetorical feature related to word order.

It studies marked and uncanonical word order in the Prophet's Hadith and its translation into English, taking a descriptive and comparative approach alongside a pragmatic functional approach in order to analyse the corpus of the study.

The analysis reveals that there are various pragmatic functions of marked word order detected in the Prophet's Hadith, including specification, glorification, importance and emphasis, generalisation, attention and curiosity, and optimism and good news.

The translator was inconsistent in his translation of marked word order, since while there are a few instances where the marked word order and thus pragmatic function is preserved, in most examples an unmarked word order is employed in the translation, and thus the pragmatic function is lost.

It is also observed that sometimes the same structure is mirrored in the English translation.

However, because of the differences between the two languages, the result is an unmarked word order in English.

Thus, more attention and consideration should be given to the translation of marked word order in the Prophet's Hadith and its pragmatic function.

Marked word order has an additional meaning that should not be overlooked in translation.