
This work contributes to existing knowledge of philosophy of language, ‘Ilm al-Tafsir and CDA by providing a comparative study of discourse analysis.

The findings thus have implications for the relatively new methodology of religious discourse in linguistic studies. In these relations, both methodologies are influenced by Greek civilisation, material subjects, successful communication and language as a medium. The similarities and differences in epistemology of language were found to consist of epistemology of language, ontology of language, language goal, and language function. These strongly suggest that the two methodologies both have circumstances that lead to the use of language, the production of language, the features of texts, the nature of meaning, the features of interpretation and the means of interpretation. Similarities and differences in language use were identified in production, meaning and interpretation. A sample of al-Sabuniy’s methodology of ‘Ilm al-Tafsir from his interpretation of surah al-Fātihah in Safwat al-Tafāsīr and a sample of Fairclough’s methodology of CDA from his analysis of political discourse in A Dialectical-Relational Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis in Social Research have been selected. This textual study applies the Sunni mainstream legal theorists’ pragmatic approach and Russell’s approach in identifying elements of language use, and employs Smith’s approach in analysing elements of epistemology of language.


How do these similarities occur? And what are the differences between the methodologies? The present work reports on a comparative study of the similarities and differences in language use and epistemology of language between the two methodologies. The methodology of ‘Ilm al-Tafsir and the methodology of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) highlight the similarities and differences in leveraging the text as research data beyond the level of the text’s structure, such as data on language use, to extend the elements of philosophy, such as epistemology of language.
