ABSTRACT
This is a stylistic investigation of an intriguing linguistic problem of stylistic change that features in Qur’anic discourse. In Arabic, shift is a rhetorical feature employed by the communicator to beautify discourse, provide vividness and break monotony, in order to keep the addressee/reader more attached to the speech act. Shift refers to stylistic change at different levels of language and occurs at different places of the Qur’anic text for different purposes, such as:
grammatical, morphological and semantic harmony,
collocation and semantic componential features inherent to a given word,
stylistic symmetry,
phonetic harmony (for cadence and assonance), and most importantly,
perlocutionary effect, that is, an illocutionary (communicative) force.
Pragmatically, the perlocutionary effects represent the impact of the text on the reader’s behaviour, feelings, beliefs, attitudes or actions. Each speech act leads the reader/listener to believe in something, to sympathise with the text producer’s viewpoints, to persuade him/her to do something and to play with his/her feelings: to make them angry or to make happy, to raise their spirits when they are in distress, to make them dare when they are fearful, to frighten or ridicule them. Thus, through words, we can achieve a perlocutionary impact on the reader/listener.