Polysemy in the Qurān
The plurality of senses that words can have. It is the property of words in all natural languages to have more than one meaning, for polysemy is an essential condition of a languages efficiency : a finite set of lexical elements is used to express a potentially infinite set of situations. Arabic words in the Qur'ān also have this property and many words in the Qur'ān have been classified as polysemous in the exegetical tradition (see Exegesis of the Qur'ān: classical and Medieval). In fact, some exegetes suggest that all words in the Qur'ān contain several meanings or levels of meaning (see Language and style of the Qur'ān, literary structures of the Qur'ān).
The possibility of ambiguity or equivocation is, however, a counterpart of polysemy-although contextual, syntactic and lexical clues in practice reduce this possibility. For examples, mutual appropriateness reduces a word's semantic pertinence so that only part of the semantic field of a word is used; the remainder is excluded or repressed. The Qur'ān, however, inhibits this reduction. It is a referential text that often does not provide a great deal of context. This difficulty was alleviated somewhat by biographical materials (Stra; see SIRA and the Qur'ān), the circumstances of revelation literature (asbab al nuzul; see occasions of Revelation) and other narrative texts that offered histerical explanations or allusions that emphasized monosemy and, by providing a context frequently missing in the Qur'ān itself, word sense disambiguation. Early works on the gharib, i.e. difficult word such as hapax legomena, foreign and dialectal words (see Foreign vocabulary; Dialect), also emphasized monosemy by providing mostly simple glosses.
On the whole, the Islamic exegetical tradition embraced polysemy in the Qur'ān. Although the Qur'ān was thought to have a divine origin and Arabic came to be viewed as a divine language, not a "natural" one, polysemy was not considered a defect (see Revelation and Inspiration; Arabic Language). Rather, Polysemy in the Qur'ān became one of miraculous features (see Miracle; Inimitability). The issue was not whether the Qur'ān was polysemous but rather how to express and limit the polysemy. As a result, polysemy has been represented or imposed in several different but overlapping ways throughout the history of reading and interpreting the Qur'ān see Readings of the Qur'ān). The question remains whether the polysemy seems discovered by the exegetes are deliberate or merely imposed upon the Qur'ān for thelological and other reasons (see theslogy and the Qur'ān).
Wujūh al-Qur'ān
The most obvious works dealing with polysemy are those of wujūh (polysemes and homonyms) and nazair (synonyms or analogues). Wujūh refers to words employed several times in the Qur'ān but with at least two and perhaps as many as forty different meanings (Abdus Sattar, Wujūh, 138). The distinction between homonym, which refers to words of different origins or roots that coincide phonetically, and polysemy, which refer to words of related origin but whose roots or derived forms have several discernable senses, is essentially arbitrary. Synchronically, homonymy is a kind of polysemy but even diachronic homonymy can become polysemy and vice versa because the criteria for distinguishing between homonym my and polysemy are themselves somewhat arbitrary. In any case, it is a distinction that those Qur'ānic exegetes who discussed wujūh did not generally make. Wujūh is a branch of the sciences of the Qur'ān (Ulum al Qur'ān; see Traditional Disciplines of Quranic study) and finds sanction in several prophetic hodiths (See Hedeth and the Qur'ān) : " The Qur'ān … conveys many meanings (wujūh); so impute to it the best of its meanings" (Zarkashi, Burhān, ii, 163).
And, '' a jurisprudents (faqih) jurisprudence is not comprehensive until he sees many wujūh in the Qur'ān " (Suyūtī, Itqān, i, 299; see law and the Qur'ān)
Muqātil b. Sulayman Cd. 150 (767) is credited with authoring the first wujūh and nazāir work (Cf. Nwyia, Exegese, 10916; Gilliot, Elt, 118 – 20). His methodology, largely followed by later authors in this genre, is to provide a gloss or brief definition for each of the meanings (wujūh ) of a word and then to list other analogous qur'ānic passages (nazāir) – that is, those in which the word is employed with the same meaning. Important early wujūh works are those of Ibn Qutayba (d.276/889), al-Dāmaghānī (d.478/1085), and Ibn al-Jawzī (d.597/1200). Of course, the subject is treated by al Zarkashi (d.794/1391) and al-suyutī (d.911/1505) in their works on the science of the Qur'ān. None of these works are systematic examinations of qur'ānic vocabulary. Rather, the words chosen by these exegetes are religiously significant ones. It should also be noted that in these works, the terms wujūh and nazā'ir are themselves somewhat polysemous (Rippin, Lexicographical texts, 167-71). By time of al-ankashe, the existence of wujūh in the Qur'ān had acquired its most important theological implication it is one " of the miracles (mujizat) of the Qur'ān since one word imparts twenty aspects (sign, wajh), or more or less; and one does not find that in the speech of mankind (zarkashi, Burhan, I,102).
Polysemy in the Qur'ān has, at least at times, been created by the exegetical tradition itself, which even has the Qur'ān inventing new meanings for some words. See, for example, the development of the association of "sleep" with bard, "cold", in order to "solve intra-Qur'ānic and Qur'ān versus dogma conflict" (Rippin, Qur'ān 78/24 , 311-20; see Dreams and Sleep; Hot and Cold). If such is the case, one can legitimately ask whether the exegetes' rich tradition of finding polysemes in the Qur'ān in more a product of the exegetes' ingenuity than a deliberate feature of the Qur'ān. Certainty may well be restricted to those words for which there are other reasons for assuming polysemy, such as the use of puns in the Qur'ān (see Humor).
As a technical term wujūh connotes that category of words that are used in different ways in different passages of the Qur'ān, but proved to be an inadequate rubric under which to discuss words, expressions and phrases, which have multiple meanings within a single passage.
REFERENCCE:
McAuliff, D.J,2004. Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān: Volume Four P_Sh. Brill, Leiden_Boston
Ps,155-156