A Cognitive Semantic Analysis of AL-Huruf AL-Muqatta’ah in Glorious Qur'an

The current study examines the Qur’anic disjointed letters (al-huruf al-muqattaʿah) within the framework of cognitive semantic perspective in order to investigate how they function within Qur’anic discourse beyond their traditional treatment as isolated lexical units. This study discusses the problem of explaining the role of these letters in meaning-making despite their apparent semantic indeterminacy. It aims to explore how al-huruf al-muqatta'ah serve as cognitive semantic opening cues, how discourse-level meaning is constructed through their interaction with the immediate co-text, and how readers’ interpretive orientation is shaped during the process of comprehension. This study adopts a qualitative analytical approach and is mainly based on Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) alongside the updated version of Schema Theory developed by Rumelhart (1980) and Anderson (1984). The data consist of 14 selected Qur’anic openings containing al-huruf al-muqatta'ah, representing one-letter, two-letter combinations, and three or five-letter combinations. The key findings reveal that al-huruf al-muqatta'ah do not function as lexical units with fixed meanings, but rather as cognitively marked openings that organise interpretation and orient the reader towards the subsequent discourse. The analysis also reveals that meaning is generated through conceptual integration between the letters and the co-text, while schema activation orients the reader towards top-down interpretive processing. Therefore, the study concludes that al-huruf al-muqatta'ah play an important role in organising Qur’anic discourse at the cognitive and interpretive levels rather than at the level of isolated lexical meaning.