Cancellation as Clarification or Contradiction: A Pragmatic Study of Verses from the Holy Quran

Abstract

The duality of ‘meaning’ and ‘saying’ in the question: “Do you mean what you say?” can be inferred according to the speaker/hearer duality. It may apparently reflect some views: a hearer who is not sure of what the speaker really means by what s/he says, a speaker who may not say what s/he means, or speaker who does not mean what s/he says. Hence, there is no concordance between what is said and what is meant. This consequently shows a distinction between an explicit and implicit meaning of the utterance. What is actually said and what is really implied is investigated by semantics and pragmatics respectively and even to use both disciplines to find out the distinguishing features.  However, that question gives rise to still a number of problems in understanding and dealing with these two notions of such a conversational phenomenon.