The Depiction of Disagreements by the Qur’ān: A Linguistic Perspective

To disagree, the addressee – in his/her relative turn (T2) – needs to rebut the speaker turn’s (T1) statement. Thus, disagreement initiates with T2. This article aims at investigating T2 disagreements in God’s messengers’ talks to disbelievers. The data, driven from Qur’ān and composed of 150 cases, were collected and categorized based on Muntigl and Turnbull’s taxonomy of disagreement, namely, Irrelevancy Claim (IC), Challenges (CH), Contradiction (CT), Counterclaim (CC) and Act Combinations (ACs), to (1) determine the most frequent T2 type disagreement and the dominant Act Combination Type disagreement form and (2) specify the relative disagreement types used by people against God’s and His Prophets’ claims and vice versa and (3) justify their differences. The findings indicate that Challenges are the most frequent T2-type-disagreement and the Combination of Contradiction and Counter Claim is the most frequent AC and that people use challenges more while God and His prophets use more ACs. Comparatively, it was found that people’s disagreements take the forms of Challenges and Counter Claims while God and His Prophets use more of Contradiction and Act combination. People were afraid of using Contradictions as they dared not to directly threaten the face of God’s messengers. Instead, they showed more inclination towards challenges through which they cast doubts on the messengers’ claims.