Formulation of the claim
Lexical statistics in the Qur’an highlight the relative presence of concepts and do not determine their meaning on their own.
Explanation
Arkoun uses lexical frequency to show that some concepts are present in abundance in the Qur’anic text, so that they appear to carry semantic weight within the structure of the discourse. Yet this numerical presence is not enough to fix the final signification of the Arabic root, because meaning is also determined by its context.
In this sense, statistics do not become a self-contained interpretation, but rather a sign of the spread of a word or concept within the corpus. They are useful for drawing an initial map of presence, not for closing off the possibility of interpretation.
Its place in the book’s argument
This atom falls within Arkoun’s practice of reading, which combines attention to linguistic material with a refusal to reduce the text to word counting. It stands at the point that separates the statistical indicator from historical and semantic understanding, a boundary that recurs in his approach to the Qur’an as a text open to multiple levels of reading.
Limits of the claim
This atom should not be given more than its methodological function: it does not say that frequency reveals the full meaning, nor that it dispenses with contextual analysis. Nor does it mean that lexical abundance is the sole criterion for the importance of a concept.