The Conventional Theory Adopted by Al-Muhaqqiq Al- Hilli (died 676 A H) In the Light of his Book(Ascents of Jurisprudence)

نظرية الوضع عند المحقق الحلّيّ (ت 676 هـ) في ضوء كتابه معارج الأصول

Abstract

Praise be to Allah, and His blessings are upon His chosen and trusted Prophet Muhammad and his immaculate household. Arabic, the language of the holy Qur'an, has been chosen by Allah, the Great and Almighty, and selected from among the rest of the other languages so as to be a proper indication and a suitable symbol for His Book(the
Holy Qur'an). Hence competing scholars and researchers have competed to explore this language and examine its minutest details and innermosts and extract its pearls and elucidate its expensive details.
Among those who assumed a deep study of this language, uncovering its secrets and explaining its minutest details were jurisprudent philologists.
In fact, they discovered facts and tiny pieces associated with the language lesson, which neither the linguists nor the grammarians or the rhetoricians paid attention to. It seems that the heaviness of the task and the grandeur of the work, which required the deduction of the legal judgments out of Allah's Book(the Qur'an), as the great source of such deduction of such legal judgments, made them deduct the finest details of the language and comprehend its secrets.
In fact, the greatness of the research and the deduction sprigs out of the greatness of the task. Among those who had the greatest portion and who had the crucial importance in studying the language so as to achieve the remotest aims in deducting legal judgments was the Jurisprudent scholar Al-Muhaqqiq Al-Hilli. This paper is an attempt to describe a linguistic theory, the jurisprudents have specialized in dealing with, let alone naming it (the conventional theory), which has opened the way to the study of the relation
between structure and meaning, and has eventually led to the appearance of other semantic relations like reality and metaphor, synonymy, homonymy, what is general and what is specific, and so forth.