How to Extract Quranic Ethical Propositions from Non-Imperative Exclamatory Sentences

Ethical propositions include sentences consisting of a subject and a predicate while its subject concerns human being and its existing aspects and the predicate expresses one of the seven ethical concepts including: "good and evil", "must and mustnt", "proper and improper", and "duty". Quranic ethical propositions are usually stated in the form of either statements or exclamatory sentences. Exclamatory sentences are either of imperative forms such as orders, prohibitions, questions, wishes and calling or they have non-imperative natures like Arabic verbs indicating praise and blame, exclamation, swearing, hope, special structures for establishing various Islamic contracts (Uqῡd and Iqᾱ'), and sentences starting with "Kam" and "Rubba". Considering the necessity to investigate the Quranic ethical propositions in a scientific and systematic way, this study attempts to analyze the non-imperative exclamatory sentences in Quran using a descriptive-analytic method in order to extract ethical propositions from Quran. Based on the outcome of this study, from among the non-imperative exclamatory sentences four kinds, namely Arabic verbs indicating praise and blame, exclamation, swearing and hope convey the two ethical concepts of "good and evil". When the predicates of such sentences include these concepts, they are determined as ethical propositions.