| المستخلص: |
This research paper responds to the question of whether there is an advan¬tage to fronting for the purpose of restriction and specification. The principle in sentence construction is to position the causative agent (al-'amel) before its predicate (al-ma'mul). But is the purpose of inverting the order to draw attention to the constituent that was promoted to an initial position or to indicate restriction and specification? A case in point is the Qur'anic verse "It is You we worship". Was the object moved to the front merely to highlight its importance or to restrict and specify the act of worship to none other than Allah? To answer this question , the paper presents the opinions of Islamic legal theorists and it was found that they have two opinions regarding this matter: - fronting is used to indicate restriction; - fronting does not indicate restriction but only highlights the importance of the fronted constituent. If it is used to indicate restriction, then there is usu¬ally another reason for using it. After careful study, it becomes obvious that the above two opinions do not conflict. Consequently, all constituents that are fronted for restrictive pur¬poses invariably draw care and attention to the fronted constituent though not vice versa. This is because this linguistic style may be used to highlight importance without necessarily indicating restriction and specification. If the first group of scholars contends that fronting is used for restrictive purposes while their contention is inconsistent with some primary and linguistic texts in which fronting is not used for restrictive purposes, then it only feasible to adopt the opinion of the majority of rhetoricians which maintains that fronting is mostly, though not invariably and consistently, used for restrictive purposes. Based on this, it is possible to say that there is no inconsistency between using fronting to draw attention and to indicate restriction simul¬taneously. This matter has practical manifestations in some legal rulings on subsidiary issues of jurisprudence.
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